Posted on

UNDER FALSE PRETENSES? Regarding our new Council

The results are official. Bryan “Bubba” Fish has been certified to take over Councilman Eriksson’s seat.  Monday, December 9th, he will be sworn in and return Council to a progressive 3-2 majority: McMorrin, Puza and Fish vs. Vera and O’Brien.  Fish stands for defunding police, eliminating “sweeps”, and eliminating car lanes.   

So what happened?  How did our candidates lose?  What can we expect next?  How can we brace ourselves?

First off, Fish ran an aggressive ground game campaign.  He was knocking on doors practically full time since June.  But more so, he was misrepresenting himself.  When people confronted him about the MOVE project downtown, and the lawsuit to prevent Council from bringing back the second car lane, he denied it.  He ran on “safe streets”, implying he’s for public safety, but avoided any mention of defunding the police – except among his supporters.  He claimed support with Dan O’Brien and Akiba rabbi Zach Shapiro – something they both made public statements rebuking.

Yasmine did the same, invoking “safety” and a picture of her with her police officer father. She also had the benefit of incumbency under a successful Council in which she was the minority.  

Our whole campaign was playing catch-up with voters, explaining to them what would really happen if he were elected to the Council majority.  He and Yasmine resisted our efforts by characterizing us as evil corporate landlords, while they pushed their presence in precincts like Fox Hills – locked down buildings where it’s hard to reach out to voters. 

The takeaway here is voters are not aware of what they voted for.  As the saying goes, a lie goes halfway around the world, while the truth is still tying its shoelaces.

What should we beware? What can we expect?

  • The second car lane downtown will probably be removed again – with a disturbing legal precedent to boot.  We should see other lane closures as well.
  • The transient camps are coming back.  Without sweeps, there’s no enforcement of sidewalks.  We can build transients the Taj Mahal, but if they don’t want to move, a progressive Council won’t touch them – or their belongings.
  • We can expect defunding CCPD to come back on the table.  The good news is, as a simple 3-2 majority, they have to wait for the normal budget process in June.
  • Incremental Infill is coming back – meaning 4-8 units on any lot, depending on their creative interpretation of SB9. 
  • Expect more of the two-hour activist diatribe on Gaza, and this Council claiming it represents Culver City residents.  We should brace for this new Council to make anti-Israel resolutions.

A lie may be faster, but the arc of justice is long.  We will prevail.  Here’s how we brace ourselves.

  • The R-word: Recall.  We mention this to manage expectations, not to make a suggestion. Recalls are made specifically for those who come in under false pretenses to do unpopular things.  But they are extremely difficult – we’d need 20% of voter signatures (~5800 valid) to spur a special election.  That’s twice what we needed for our initiative.  
  • That means we need to start with groundwork – we need to tell Council we will hold them accountable if they enact policies they didn’t run on and weren’t voted in to do. Then we need to keep tabs on their performance, regarding the above policies.
  • To do this, we need to make the threat credible, or they will call our bluff and ignore us.  We have the experience of getting our initiative on the ballot, and others have the experience of the Fisch/Lee recall attempt.  But to make this threat stick, we need a professional effort with its own PAC and fundraising.  PCC will not support any recall effort that doesn’t have an associated PAC with proper funding.
  • Election analysis showed that we were victorious in the park neighborhoods – even Tellefson Park area, which has a lot of multifamily renters.  It was neighborhoods like Fox Hills and Arts District, where we aren’t as present or voters are behind locked doors, where Bubba prevailed. That means we need to extend our outreach.  “Did you know you voted for x/y/z?  Would you have voted for Yasmine and Bubba if you knew they were going to do these things?”  Based on that, we can gauge and build support for a recall.

Constituents concerned about these issues should contact the new Council and express their opinions as soon as possible. Speaking during the inaugural Council meeting would be an auspicious time to do this.

Posted on

For a SAFE and SANE Culver City

We support Albert Vera, Denice Renteria, and Jeannine Wisnosky-Stehlin for Culver City council.

We also support Andrew Lachman and Lindsay Carlson for School Board

The difference between the six competitive Council candidates has never been clearer.

Do you want a Safe Culver City?  Do you want our police funded, with the tools they need to fight crime and keep our streets clear of major transient camps?  Vote Albert, Denice and Jeannine. 

Do you want a Sane Culver City?  Did you want that second lane of car traffic downtown?  Do you want sane zoning laws and road plans that reflect our needs as a city?  Do you want budgets and housing plans that pencil out?  Vote Albert Denice and Jeannine.

Over the past two years, the Vera-O’Brien-Eriksson council majority reversed disastrous policies of the previous progressive councils:

  • Cleaned up the Venice/405, Senior Center, and other transient camps – a heroic effort which required coordination with the city and county of Los Angeles as well as the state HomeKey program.
  • Brought back a second car lane downtown – despite the frivolous lawsuit to stop them.  Thus ending much needless congestion.
  • Ended Incremental Infill – preserving the quality of our neighborhoods, while still meeting our housing goals.
  • Kept Culver City PD fully funded and equipped to handle our challenges in public safety.

Both Councilmembers O’Brien and Eriksson endorse Vera, Renteria, and Wisnosky-Stehlin to continue these policies.

Candidates Yasmine McMorrin, Bubba Fish, and Nancy Barba promise to reverse these changes.

Their policies are so bad, they can’t even admit them.  Is this who you want?

Mayor McMorrin – who abstained from so many votes because she felt they looked better than NO votes.  She either abstained or voted against:

  • Bulletproof vests for police officers
  • All our budgets
  • Removing the transient camps at Venice/405 and the Senior Center
  • Reversing MOVE downtown to bring back a second car lane

Barba – who rejected the poll results about our zoning because the people who voted are “too old.”  Does she think you’re too old to live in Culver City?

Fish and Barba – who will not answer whether they oppose bringing back the second car lane downtown.  Even though they both contributed to the lawsuit to stop it.  And their own attorney testified in the lawsuit that, if they were elected to a majority, they would take that second care lane away.

Posted on

Our Council endorsements for 2024

We endorse for Council:
Albert Vera
Denice Renteria
Jeannine Wisnosky-Stehlin

As we’ve said in our article “What’s at Stake This Election” – we have some critical issues at stake in November: from defunding the police, to managing our transient camps, to how many lanes our roads will have.  We don’t need to hand out questionnaires, or get promises – the candidates have solidly staked their differences.

Since our inception in 2019, we’ve gone from a 4-1 progressive Council that nearly defunded our police, to a 3-2 moderate council that is keeping our streets clean, our zoning laws sane, and our police funded.  

We also know that we are up against a progressive machine that wants the transient camps back, more lane closures, and doesn’t even want our police to have basic necessities like bulletproof vests.  

That’s why this election is a no-brainer.  The only question is how we get the word out to 29,000 voters who aren’t necessarily aware of the issues. Endorsement allows us to tackle this question clearly.

Posted on

What’s at stake this election

2024 will see Protect Culver City’s five year anniversary.  We began at 2am June 25th, 2019, after Council implemented rent control.  It was how they did it that struck us – in the dead of night, by a Council that never ran on the issue, shutting out all resident input and following verbatim the demands of their militants.  Thus we knew that rent control would not be our only or even primary issue.

We had no idea how right we’d be.  The following year Culver City saw the worst riots since the Rodney King riots of 1992.  Westfield Culver City would have been ransacked were it not for the heroic efforts of the Culver City Police Department.  To thank them, this same council that passed rent control pushed to defund them by 50%.  That proposal was narrowly defeated after one of their own, Coucnilman Fisch, balked at such a radical move.  That began our Defend Don’t Defund campaign, which highlighted Vera and Eriksson’s commitment to CCPD – and the commitment of others to defund it. 

Eriksson won re-election by a narrow 32 votes that year.  If he had lost to Puza, we would not have a police department as we know it.

Since then we have solidified our commitment to the city to inform residents on several issues that should be dealbreakers for any candidate – but unfortunately are not anymore:

  • Culver City should have a police department that enforces laws.  This is not a debate about what the budget should be, or what functions should be offloaded, but whether we have a functional police department.  Defunding 50% would cease their function as crime prevention and demote them to crime reporting. 
  • Our city has the right to clean up transient camps.  If we have a place to send transients, but they don’t want to go, we have the authority to compel them to move.
  • The city is growing and getting denser.  But we should not sacrifice the quality of our neighborhoods to get there.  Likewise, densification requires public space -and in turn, public safety.
  • We believe in the laws of physics and economics.  “Build more housing” does not summon builder elves.  We need economic policies that pencil out and work at the scale that we need – NOT blank checks to developers.  Likewise, naturally occurring affordable housing – i.e., Mom and Pop multifamily – should be supported, not penalized.
  • We push for such transparency and accountability in all the city’s finances, including the school board.
  • We need traffic policies that reflect the reality of commuting in Los Angeles.

These issues should be dealbreakers – but unfortunately, they are not anymore.  “Our Culver”, the latest activist organization in Culver City, advertised their initial meeting “Fund This!” at Veterans Park in April.  They made their intentions clear.  They see this as their Culver City, not everybody’s.  “Fund This!”, as Councilman O’Brien has pointed out, is an allusion to defunding the police – reviving their 2020 demands.  They try to soften the rhetoric for election season, by claiming they’re just diverting some funds to other programs like parks.  But they are otherwise quite clear about their intentions. 

Their tactics don’t stop here.  The MOVE lane closures downtown were enormously unpopular and helped swing the city council from 3-2 for it to 3-2 against it.  But rather than concede defeat, they preferred to file a frivolous lawsuit against the city to delay restoring the lanes.  One of the plaintiffs, Bubba Fish, is running for Council this year with activist support.  Regarding the rent registry doxing, they filed a complaint against Albert Vera, which is delaying council from discussing it as well. 

These tactics show they consider this their city, and they do not wish to share it democratically.

And while they did not stop the new Council from cleaning up the camps at the Senior Center and Venice/405, it took the new Council to get this done.  If they take back the majority, the camps will come back.  Their philosophy is anathema to ours: we can build transients the Taj Mahal – if they don’t want to move, we can’t make them. Compelling them to move, they claim, “causes harm.”

With basic livability issues like these at stake this election, you’d think electing sympathetic councilmembers would be a slam dunk.  Yet even with all the new moderate political organizations sprouting up in Culver City, the outcome of this election is not secure.

This is because when it comes to elections, the activists don’t run on the issues.  At Protect Culver City, we know this all too well.  If they advertised themselves as the candidates to shut down CCPD, shut down key car lanes, or allow tent cities, they would lose.  Instead, they come up with wild stories about Hackman buying out council.  Or smearing anyone who dares run against them.

Just Google our name, Protect Culver City, and you’ll see any number of hitpieces about us.  You’d think Hackman paid hundreds of thousands to import tiki torch donning Nazis into Culver City to smash the hopes and dreams of some innocent hippies.  It sounds like madness, but these articles get wide distribution through and outside our fair city, though activists on social media.  These hitpieces take their tolls.  They reach well meaning voters, who then second guess their support for candidates we support.  It chills the election environment, and prevents our supporters from campaigning openly and effectively.  Meanwhile, these activists proudly strut around their support for their own candidates.

We anticipated these tactics.  When we first formed to push back on the rent control conversation, we predicted that Council would not pay attention to us unless we forced them to.  Our ballot measure did that.  But rather than discuss rent control, they wrote hit pieces about us as some dangerous right wing threat. 

From our police department, to zoning, to dealing with transient camps, they kept these same tactics. 

Today we remain the only PAC in Culver City to have forced them to campaign against us.  Which is why we’ve borne the brunt of their attacks.  Other candidates thought they could just run on the issues and get slam-dunk support from voters.  They quickly saw their names dragged through the mud.  Thus learning the hard lesson that these are not neutral issues – one must stand up and fight for them.

But the city is adjusting.  Several other PACs have formed to push back against the progressive slate, as well as candidates championing them.  For better or worse, Culver City now has party politics.  It doesn’t translate to Democrat/Republican – the above issues enjoy wide bipartisan support – rather, it acknowledges that an individual candidate can no longer win on their own.  They need the support of these PACs and their members, who are ready to mobilize.

We already know who the progressives have picked to represent them – Yasmine McMorrin, Bubba Fish, and Nancy Barba.  The loose coalition of PACs opposing them are supporting Albert Vera, Denice Renteria, and Jeannine Wisnosky Stehlin.  These latter three have the thankless job of remaining above the fray of mudslinging while championing the causes we do. 

So how do we support them?  By sticking to the issues.  We cannot react in kind to the tactics of these activists.  We do not name-call, nor are we simply here to resist their agenda.  We have to put forth our own vision for the city, our stance on the issues, and where the candidates stand on these issues.  And we have to remind 29,000 Culver City voters what those issues are, and where the candidates stand.

Again, these seem like slam dunk issues.  But we can fully expect these activists to muddy the water and make the election about anything but these issues.  We need to campaign on these issues, loud and clear, to 29,000 voters.  We need mailer campaigns, door knockers and phone bankers of our own.  Our members need to have the tools to reach out to their neighbors and discuss these issues that essentially separate Vera, Renteria, and Wisnosky-Stehlin from Imani-McMorrin, Fish and Barba.

When voters are aware of these issues, vote on these issues, and ignore the noise and the mudslinging, we win.  We all win.

Posted on

No on E: our homes are not your ATM

Arguing against a ballot measure is always difficult, especially when it comes to schools.  Immediately you must face the argument “why don’t you support our children? Why are you so miserly?”

But this measure will raise our property taxes significantly – $600/year per $1mil valuation of our homes.  And many homeowners in Culver City are on a fixed income – this extra $1000+ year tab won’t be easy to swallow.  Unlike a sales tax, there is no avoiding this.  Those of us footing the bill should expect an accounting of how that money will be spent. 

And right away we see issues in the language of the bond.  The money will be spent on needed repairs.  Not a brand new building or an overarching vision to renovate the campus.  Shouldn’t repairs be part of the general budget?  Yes, they should. 

So why are they asking for a bond to do needed repairs?  The answer is we have a school board that just isn’t very good at managing money.  They haven’t had a controller since March 2023, and have had issues staffing a number of other officers.   

One thing they’re not missing is their new assistant superintendent of DEI, along with a staff and office, or consultants at New Earth which apparently got most of the Measure K Parcel tax, passed in 2018.  The school board stonewalled the oversight committee.  When residents asked for some transparency, New Earth sent them cease and desist orders – with emails apparently provided by the assistant superintendent. People suspect that’s why the assistant superintendent is currently on leave.

When you look at who’s funding the passage of this bond, it gets worse.  $25,000 donated by TELACU construction and $10,000 by PJHM architects.  TELACU came under scrutiny in 2014 for its pay to play tactics in Centinela Valley school district.  They are actively campaigning for the very bond measure they stand to profit from. Some would consider it the standard kind of horse trading that goes on in elections.  It doesn’t make it any less repugnant to a small town based on small donations.  And it’s hypocritical given that the same people accused Hackman of buying out the city by donating $5000 to us. 

We get it.  Our city has expenses.  Sometimes, those expenses reach beyond the general budget, and the city needs to ask us to pitch in a bit extra to maintain or upgrade services. 

We just don’t think they’re into this bond for the benefit of the kids.

Given what we’ve seen – of this school board’s history, of their stated intentions for this bond measure, and of our ability to audit what they spend it on – this bond measure does not pass that scrutiny.  Vote NO on this one.  Our homes are not the school board’s ATM every time they come up short.

Posted on

Our endorsement of Jonathan Hatami for District Attorney

District Attorney George Gascon’s radical policies have made LA County dramatically less safe.  Per CCPD statistics, crime in Culver City is up nearly 50% since he took office in January 2021.  There is little debate that the next district attorney needs to quickly and effectively undo the damage he has done.  

Many candidates have stepped forward to claim they would do exactly this.  Except for a couple candidates, challengers all agree on this platform.  

Hatami came seeking our endorsement in such a field of qualified and well funded challengers.  Our endorsement of him is not a criticism of these others, who we expect to support should they make it past the primary election.

We are endorsing Hatami because his story sparked our members with enthusiasm.  His is a simple story of a survivor of child abuse, who’s dedicated his life to giving victims justice and closure for crimes committed against them.  His role in the Gabriel Fernandez child abuse case got 30 million views on Netflix.  People know him and are ready to go to bat for him.

For us at Protect Culver City, that’s what matters.  Endorsing Hatami will allow us to harness our member enthusiasm.  We can rally behind one candidate and get the word out about the importance of the district attorney race.  We won’t confuse people with subtle distinctions.  

Most importantly, being able to campaign for him in the primary will get more voters out to vote against George Gascon and make sure he doesn’t et 50% of the vote in March – because if he does, he’s automatically re-elected.

We think Hatami is qualified, electable, and has a broad reach and a compelling story to challenge Gascon.  We at Protect Culver City are proud to offer him our endorsement.

So what does this mean?

Endorsing Hatami means we can start getting the word out to Culver City residents about the importance of this race.  Door hangers and flyers cost money – for that, we need your help!  It costs about $2500 to get a door hanger out to everyone who’s not behind a secure building.

DONATE NOW

The issue simply isn’t who to vote for – it’s who we need to make sure doesn’t make it past the primary.  Jeff Chemerinsky has several key endorsements – but at the DA debate the other candidates called him “Mini Gascon.”  They have reason to.  His father Erwin served on Gascon’s transition team.  And Jeff’s answers revealed he will do nothing different.

Posted on

2024 Political Outlook – meet the BoS candidates!

Our current Council is divided 3-2 on issues people once took for granted:

  • Restore a second lane of traffic downtown
  • Defend CCPD funding and reputation
  • Remove tent camps at Senior Center and freeway underpasses

The 2024 election appears to be no different. Meanwhile, Culver City has graduated beyond the era of individual candidate. We now have two political “parties” in our city, for lack of a better term. Currently, the three member Council majority, and several players, are lining up behind three candidates for 2024: Albert Vera, Jeannine Wisnosky-Stehlin, and Denice Renteria. The two member Council minority is standing behind Yasmine Imani-McMorrin, Bubba Fish, and Nancy Barba.

As this election won’t be until November, with no primary, we will have this on the back burner. The March primary has some more pressing issues to deal with – County Supervisor, District Attorney, and a CCUSD bond issue.

Culver City requires cooperation with the County Supervisors to deliver on public safety and resolving homelessness.  Our current supervisor, Holly Mitchell, is a Housing First advocate and a police Defunder, who just renewed her endorsement of DA George Gascon.  We need better representation at the county level if we are to succeed as a city.  Meet a couple candidates who have a different vision for the county.

We will host meet and greets for two challengers:

Monday, December 4th, 7pm
Daphne Bradford
daphnebradford.com
JOIN ONLINE

Wednesday, December 13th, 7pm
Clint Carlton
carlton24.com

In-person at Veterans’ Park Kaizuka Room or online via Zoom

No RSVP needed for Zoom – but encouraged for in-person

Download our PDF flyer!

Daphne is an independent based out of Ladera Heights.  Clint is a Democrat based out of Marina Del Rey.  Both speak emphatically about the need for public safety in the county as well as the County’s responsibilities on resolving homelessness.  We encourage people to check out their websites and get in contact with the candidates.

Posted on

Political Outlook for 2023

Getting past a bad faith Council

Protect Culver City was founded in July 2019 in response to Council passing rent control.  It wasn’t that they passed rent control, but how they passed it, that was cause for concern.  An issue nobody ran on, with no discussion, passed in the dead of night, over some unfounded pretext of an epidemic of evictions and gouging.  Based on this, we knew rent control would not be our only or even primary issue.  We need to take on the housing debate, and a bad faith council in general, if we were going to turn around this city.  Since then, we’ve been involved in the following issues:

  • Defending our police department – both their reputation and budget
  • Raising the public safety and health issue of homeless camps
  • Educating voters on Council’s upzoning plans
  • Keeping an honest debate on housing affordability, and questioning the effectiveness of rent control
  • Keeping voters aware of other issues that come up, such as the SEIU pay increase

In the 3.5 years since, our efforts have been more than vindicated.  For the first time, we have a majority on our Council that will listen to us.  But the bad faith elements remain – yes in the Council minority, but more so in their supporters.  Here’s what we’re seeing and where we’re going as a city.

The New Council: promises made, promises kept

The new council was sworn in December 12th and wasted no time getting to work undoing the damage of the previous council.  They immediately convened a special council meeting on the 21st to discuss an anti-camping ordinance for Culver City, mirroring the ordinances at Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and Los Angeles.  Staff has been instructed to draft this ordinance to be voted on January 23rd meeting, and will be implemented sometime in late February.  This will coincide with Los Angeles’s emergency declaration on homelessness, and will serve to ensure transients don’t simply cross city lines to find a more lenient place to live.

Council has promised a few things about any prohibition on camping in Culver City:

  1. Nobody will be arrested or cited for being homeless.
  2. Nobody will be forced to move unless we have shelter available for them.
  3. This ordinance is slated to go into effect at the same time our Homekey hotels go online, promising plenty of available beds for anybody who needs it.

There are some exceptions to these promises.  Camping in Culver City parks has always been illegal.  Those who try to camp here will always be moved out, regardless of other conditions.  The city also reserves the right for “sweeps”: in this case, getting street campers to pick up their belongings, temporarily, while the city “sweeps” the sidewalk.  This fulfills a basic duty of sanitation for campers and residents alike.  Once sanitation workers have completed their duties, the campers are free to return.

This fulfills the legal requirement of Martin vs. Boise – that no anti-camping ordinance shall be enforced if the city doesn’t have a place to send people.  And that’s the issue we pushed during our campaign: “if we have some where to send them, but they don’t want to go, can we compel them?”  Council has even gone a step beyond the basic requirement of shelter.  Our shelters are actually better understood as “navigation centers” – temporary spots for people as we figure out permanent housing for them.

We go well above and beyond Martin v Boise requirements because it’s such a contentious issue, with dark money lawfare firms ready to sue the city at the slightest opportunity.  Meanwhile, activists answer the above question with a resounding “NO, WE CANNOT.”  They envision a purely voluntary method for getting people into shelter and housing.  If they don’t want to move, we can’t touch them.  This philosophy got us to where we are today.

These activists constitute two of our councilmembers – Freddy Puza and Yasmine Imani-Mcmorrin, as well as several commissioners like Stephen Jones and Nancy Barba.

It would be one thing if we could have a good faith philosophical disagreement about how to handle homelessness and street camping.  Unfortunately, activists are being deceptive about the whole debate.  They make out “sweeps” to be some kind of mass arrest, envisioning stormtroopers descending on a camp at 4am and marching people off to concentration camps in Palmdale.

This is ludicrous, and Councilmembers have said none of this is happening.  But activists make this accusation as a dodgy attempt to get a promise from Council that they will do no sweeps.  But rest assured – when they say “sweeps”, they mean exactly what we mean.  They are trying to push councilmembers to agree to never touch a camp unless the occupants willingly move. 

Transient Camps, Homelessness, and Housing Affordability

Behind this voluntary philosophy on our camps is the basic contention that housing is unaffordable.  Fix affordability, and our transient camps will go away.  Without that, there’s nothing we can do about them.

On the surface, they have a point.  The new developments Council has approved go for multiple times what historic multifamily units go for.  We called attention to this during our Measure B campaign “which way, Culver City?”  We pointed out in 2020 that a typical multifamily 2br went for $2000, while a new development “stack n pack” 2br went for $4500+.  This latter number continues to skyrocket, dragging multifamily rents along with it.  Meanwhile, Council’s “affordable” unit stipulations and overlay provide a questionable amount of housing to offset this.

Councilmember Puza said on the dais that rent control helped stop homelessness.  This was a disingenuous argument.  The homeless we see in Culver City are not locals driven out by rising rents.  The debate on the transients we do have is whether they can be indoors at all.  The housing and shelters we provide must come with wraparound services which include addiction treatment.

Meanwhile, Council’s rent control plans were a solution looking for a problem – and are punitive towards multifamily owners.  The more conspiratorially minded would think that it was designed to drive older multifamily properties off the market, leaving only newer developments to rent from. 

Whether the intention is there or not, we believe that punitive measures on our most affordable housing will only make the problem worse.  Meanwhile we’d like to work with Council to come up with better solutions to offer everyone a chance to live in our city at an affordable rate.  Our rent control administration comes at a cost of $1.5 million a year.  This money could be much better spent expanding our Section 8 program or offering other means testing methods to offer affordable housing. 

But multifamily housing needs to be protected and nourished as the last affordable housing at the scale we need.

Police, Zoning, SEIU – the common factor

Let’s clarify right away.  Each one of these issues was a separate campaign for us, with its own budget.  Lumping them together does not make them any less important.  In fact we quickly found our Defend Don’t Defund CCPD campaign of the 2020 season quickly eclipsed our Measure B campaign.  This campaign gave shape to our opposition.  Nearly 80% of Culver City residents may support CCPD – but they quickly found that making their support public earned the fury of the activists.  We had so many signs stolen we wound up on the evening news.  The Knock LA blog wrote the hitpiece on us, saying we ran a racist intimidation campaign – when the only vandalism was against us.

But they attacked us because we were effective.  This campaign punctured the halo of the progressives.  For the first time, voters realized voting for them could cause real permanent damage to our city.  We believe this campaign helped turn things around and set the stage for 2022. 

The zoning issue was a bit more complicated for us.  Since most of us are multifamily owners, ending single family zoning didn’t hit us as personally as it did homeowners.  But again, it’s how Council approached this debate that raised the alarm.  They put in the minimum outreach they could get away with.  They used loaded words to claim anyone who opposed eliminating single family was a racist throwback to a segregated Culver City. 

We did our best to get out accurate information to residents.  But we were happy to take a back seat to emergent city groups like Culver City Neighbors United.  Not just because it took the burden off of us.  But it was a sign more residents were waking up to the bad faith tactics of the Council majority.  That allowed everyone to work in parallel to flip that third seat away from the activist slate.  

Not to be outdone, the SEIU has been pushing all last year to get a pay increase for their workers at Brotman Hospital through Council fiat.  They’re couching this in a “minimum wage for health care workers” – which would go slightly beyond them.  But considering Brotman is the only hospital in town, it basically hits their employees the most. 

SEIU has spent over $400,000 in PAC money on this goal – and that’s only until June of this year.  This figure alone already matches everything Hackman spent on the election, and they’re continuing to spend money to bully our current city council to pass this law.  While our activist friends have sounded the alarm about Hackman’s money, they have been completely silent about this.

The exiting council passed this law while the incoming council waited to be inaugurated – an unprecedented move.  Once the new council took the dais, they reversed the decision, saying it’s not Council’s position to declare wages in this city, that SEIU needs to do collective bargaining to get the wages they want for their workers.  Council also did this to avoid another lawsuit from the hospital.

We’re already seeing deceptive mailers from SEIU asking people to bully the new council into passing their law.  They mailer claims the new council “cut their pay.”  Nobody’s pay was cut.  Council reversed a decision that never went into effect. 

Again, this shows the deeper issue in our city.  Working in the interests of residents may seem like a no-brainer – but it also gets the opposition of some powerful and well-funded outside interests.   

Activists?  Progressives?  Who are they, and what do we call them?

Ultimately these activists reflect a tiny minority of people who actually live in this city.  Though they come with a lot of outside support from unions and dark money nonprofits.  We see the same fifteen residents at meeting after meeting, loudly claiming to represent the city, even though people are becoming increasingly aware of them – and tired of them.

They call themselves “progressives” – saying they represent progress, while anyone who opposes them is some Bull Connor 50s reactionary throwback.  But where are they progressing toward?  A city where people are locked down in secured stack-n-pack developments, terrified of streets teeming in anarchy?  Needless to say, we disagree with this progress.  An urban environment means public spaces that work for everyone.  Public spaces require public safety.  We have a fundamental right to be secure in one’s home and person – regardless of living conditions.  The barbaric conditions we see in our transient camps is unfit for anyone.

In that sense, this isn’t a division of “progressive” vs. “conservative” – and people do themselves a disservice by drawing the line that way.  Plenty of progressives in Culver City are aligning with us on this issue.  People only drive them away with this talk.

“Activist” seems a more fitting term, because it’s what they are.  We can never compete with them for devotion to a cause.  Most of us have family and jobs that keep us very occupied.  They can show up to 4pm rallies, noon council meetings in Los Angeles, and all night to spend talking on all agenda items.  But that also has its shortcomings.  The more involved we become, the more we too become activists. 

“Meghanites” has also been floated around as a cute term, as they all seem to stem from Meghan Sahli-Wells’ organizing efforts from the past ten years or so.  That too has its shortcomings, not least because it’s an ad hominem.  But also because they come with strong support from outside the city.  For example, the first speaker at Council’s meeting on an anti-camping ordinance was a Holly Mitchell representative, speaking against the ordinance.  What does that tell us about our future relations with the County?  Especially considering we depend on County Prop H money to fund our housing and shelters?

Whatever we decide to call them, we must understand who they are.  And why seemingly popular issues, like defending our police department or cleaning out our homeless camps, are so hard to fight for.  Really, the fight here is between councilmembers who fight for the residents, and those who capitulate to outside interests. 

Conclusions – looking to 2024

If there’s one lesson to be learned from our experience, it’s this – you have to fight for the things you care about.  Our police, our parks, and the overall character of our city may be immensely popular.  But we will still be attacked for defending them – and not just by people in our city. 

Plenty of outside activists, from unions to dark money nonprofits, to university academics, see Culver City as their Petri dish for their pet programs.  The new council majority gives us the opportunity to solve problems created by activists.  But they won’t take this lying down – they will continue to pressure Council and residents to surrender to their demands, by any means necessary.  This new council majority needs our help, and we must continue to fight and support them.

We also must look forward to the 2024 election season, where Albert Vera is up for re-election and two other seats are up for grabs.    

The best way to support them, and prepare for the 2024 election, is by simply speaking the truth – loud and clear, to as many voting residents as possible.