A Culver City Political Action Committee dedicated to the residents
Our PAC wasn't the only one to take calls to defund Culver City's Police Department seriously. A number of ex-mayors, ex-councilmembers, and other city leaders have stepped forward to give their statements in support of our elite police department. These citizens have no relationship to our PAC. We are just happy to see others are stepping forward with similar concerns. Here they are as follows:
The 405 project continues. On Tuesday, May 12th, we held a Webex meeting to further discuss a Neighborhood Watch around the Venice/405 and other 405 underpasses in Culver City. Former mayor Richard Marcus (1999-2000) was our featured speaker. He discussed his experience building a Neighborhood Watch around Sunkist Park back in the 90s. We then looked compared his experiences with our challenges, and what we could learn from him. We were surprised at how little things change.
Richard talked about the issues in the 90s. Gangs, drug dealing, dogs defecating in a park where children play. The breaking point came when people’s cars were being stolen or vandalized in their own driveways, and burglars who tied a homeowner to a chair while they helped themselves to her belongings and food. Richard realized if he didn’t do something, he’d be next.
Richard started complaining to the police, then realized they don’t know who he is or whether he’s on their side. They explained the concept of a Neighborhood Watch, and that if he could get eight people together, they’d come and talk to him and his neighbors. The idea of talking to his neighbors was a foreign concept, but Richard went ahead anyway. That first meeting, he was hoping for his eight people. 65 people wound up showing up. That’s how bad things were.
He mentioned three pillars a proper Neighborhood Watch relies on – which definitely chimes with our own experience:
A big point he made was to address the crime, not the people. We’ve already noticed this in our own calls. If you call in someone sleeping on the sidewalk, the first thing CCPD will ask is “do they look high? Do they have any weapons?” They’re looking for signs of criminal activity. Again, much as some people would like, the police have no authority to stop and question someone for living on the street and “experiencing homelessness.”
Richard had the same issue with gangs in Sunkist Park in the 90s. You can’t arrest someone for being in a gang, or hanging around in a park. Even if you know they’re up to no good, that’s not enough for police to come and do something. But you can let them know they’re on notice, and the locals are watching and reporting.
The police do want to help. They just need the authority to act first. “Yes, the police are on a leash, but they’re still dogs” Richard said to audible laughter. Again, if we call in suspicious criminal activity, the police will come, and they will have authority to act on it. Even under the current legal revolving door, when open drug use and other criminal activity gets you in and out of jail in a couple hours. You still ruined someone’s high for the day. If they know they can’t get high or cause mischief around your block, they’ll go find another spot.
That makes deterrence the primary goal of a Neighborhood Watch. Richard mentioned the “Oh Crap” signs they posted around their neighborhood: “If I don’t call you, my neighbor will.” Someone up to no good sees the sign, and is officially on notice. Especially once the word gets out that these signs are backed up by residents.
Building the Neighborhood Watch took work, but was not too complicated and is relatively easy to replicate: make flyers about the next meeting, and hand them out around the neighborhood. Eventually they got to the point where people came up to Richard, upset that they never got a flyer. Those people “self-identify themselves as volunteers.” They would get 30 flyers of their own and instructions to hand them around their block. This is how the watch grew. For money, they fundraised by selling their “Oh Crap” signs to neighbors.
We learned last night that while we’re in a new situation with the Venice/405 camp, the basic principles haven’t changed. If we’re vigilant, we can keep control of our neighborhood. But we need to be disciplined and productive. We need to go from frustrated individuals to an organization that the police can trust. That's when we can get our way.
Ultimately, Richard’s Neighborhood Watch was a victim of its own success. As Sunkist Park got safer, residents got complacent and dropped out. Meanwhile, people with political agendas found a captive audience to push their politics.
But there’s no reason we can’t do what Richard and his neighbors did 20 years ago.
In order to better moderate comments, the city has routed all comments through the city website. If you send an e-mail to public.comment@culvercity.org, you'll get a reply saying you need to go to www.culvercity.org/agendas instead, and post your comment there. Here's some basic instructions:
The account setup is a one time process. The advantage of this is, if you set up a bio, people will get to know your better and who you are. This way we see who is a stakeholder in this city.
Remember to get your comments in before 4pm - though it sounds like with this process, you can enter them even during the meeting. Any questions, feel free to reply to this e-mail. Or check out the city's how-to Youtube.
It started with a contentious LA Times article about Los Angeles officials accusing Culver City of dumping their homeless into Los Angeles. Now the 405 underpasses in Culver City are filling up with vagrants setting up permanent residence.
Council claims that there is no change in policy, but the unwritten policy is obvious - our streets and parks are open for anyone who would call them home. The effects are immediate and obvious. Local residents and businesses are furious and desperate. Add recent laws like Prop 47, and many crimes now also go unresolved. It seems we have no meaningful way to stop this.
We have decided to step in and figure out what we can do. We held a meeting with city officials at CCPD HQ. We also went to the homelessness committee meeting last month. We learned that if someone decides to set up residence on our streets and in our parks, the city will do nothing to stop them. But if they break any of our ordinances, we have every right to call it in.
That's what we're doing. This page will serve as a repository for all our experience with those who would treat our streets as a permanent residence, and how they terrorize local residents and businesses. We will follow up with our police and with our council. Our ultimate aim is to make our streets safe and parks safe again. Our ultimate sympathy is with besieged residents, who feel helpless to stop this.
This project will focus on the 405 underpasses and surrounding areas, like Tellefson Park and Veteran's Park. Because that's the canary in the coal mine. If we let these areas be overrun with transients, it's only a matter of time before our entire community is overrun.
We are approaching the final month of our six allotted months to get 2800 qualified signatures for our ballot initiative to require voter approval for rent control. This past month was by far the most active. We hired on a paid signature service to do the heavy lifting, while our volunteers were cancelling weekend plans so they could all pitch in.
Our proposal has been simple: we want to put rent control, recently passed by council, up to a vote. We don’t feel that current council has been up front about their plans for rent control. Passing something this consequential should have a proper discussion among the voters of Culver City. Our initiative, if passed, would treat rent control just like a tax increase. If city council wants it, they need to get voter approval for it. If it passes a popular vote, we can live with that.
When you talk to thousands of residents (and non-residents) about such a nuanced topic, you get a whole spectrum of responses. We’d like to address some of these.
First, the very two words, “rent control.” We’ve come to appreciate just how much mythology is built around the term. Many people’s eyes light up, just when they hear those two words. Like it’s some magical panacea that will preserve a time when rents were reasonable in this city. Many favor it as well as opposing development, betraying a lack of concern for basic supply and demand, or how this city is changing.
It doesn’t help that council, in pushing for rent control, has indulged such a fantastic outlook. They’ve cited “rent burdened households” – people who pay more than a third of their income on rent. As if rent control, or anything short of state funded housing, would actually change this. Or that they present a cartoonish view of landlords sitting on infinite profits, and that whatever happens they can shoulder that burden.
We approach people with a simple phrase “require voter approval for rent control” and often people just hear two words: “rent control.” We are then confronted with a whole array of misconceptions. How many realized our city even passed rent control? Are we for or against rent control? The combination of this mythology, and lack of awareness of what city council is up to, alone justifies our mission. We want a city that knows what it’s getting into – not one that gets led by the nose.
For the most part, our petition is hard to say no to. What's wrong with more democracy? What's wrong with having a vote and an actual conversation on it? Most people, even ones who are for rent control, don't have a problem signing it. That is the strength of our petition.
Of course, occasionally we “step on a bomb” – to use the Minesweeper terminology. Generally it’s someone who is politically tied to council. They ask baited questions, make ad hominems, and throw the occasional accusation that we are the ones being misleading. We’ve heard accusations that our paid gatherers have used terms like “for rent control”, “protect renters’ rights”, “protect 3% rental cap”.
We took all these accusations seriously and followed up as much as we could. Our experience is none of these accusations add up. We know where all our people are out on the field at any time. The accusations either mismatched the canvasser on the field, or the time they were in that area. More so, they reflect people who made up a story. The talking points above are also ones we would never use, even if we were interested in misleading people. Those are the terms of rent control activists, and we reject that language entirely. Or they’re second order hearsay, with no means of following up.
Of course, transparency and honesty are an artform in a campaign like this. It’s always someone’s first day. Even if they have the script, they are not familiar with people’s reaction to it. In our early days, some of us used the phrase “put rent control on the ballot” – but we realized even that could be improved, considering the number of people who didn’t even realize it was enacted already. So we quickly adjusted it.
Now, when we tell people “require voter approval for rent control” – and we stress to use the word “require” in our opening phrase – it leads to a whole series of questions. What happens if it gets on the ballot? What happens to rent control if it passes? Won’t this end rent control? Our own mayor has misled people on the dais by saying exactly that – that it’s some subterfuge to get rid of rent control.
It is true that if our ballot initiative passes, and council does nothing else, their rent control administration is rendered null and unenforceable. But council can easily acknowledge our petition and launch a counter-initiative. They can put their own rent control administration on the ballot. They would only need to vote for it with a simple majority by August, and we’ll all get to vote on it in November alongside our own initiative. If theirs passes, their rent control remains whether our initiative passes or not. No need for 2800 signatures and a costly campaign.
For council to say that our initiative is a sneaky attempt to stop their rent control is an implied refusal to acknowledge us, those who signed our initiative, or the city at large. It is an implicit acknowledgment that they refuse to hear our voices, that they refuse to let us decide the fate of our own city. This is where our petition has force. If they refuse to listen to the voters of Culver City, and we're loud enough, they don't get to keep their rent control.
And this is where their only reasonable argument against our petition comes in. Their supporters feel they got elected, this gives them unlimited power to do what they want without being questioned or curtailed.
That’s when we point out our petition is about so much more than rent control – it’s about curtailing a council that has gone rogue. We see their hubris and contempt for residents on so many issues: Allowing transients to set up permanent residence on our streets and in our parks. Building a homeless shelter on park land right in the middle of town. Allowing minors to vote or sit on boards and commissions. Scrapping mayoral rotation and even entire commissions established by city charter.
They didn’t run on any of these things.
When we stop by in the next couple weeks, to ask you if you’d like you to sign our petition, keep this in mind. This isn’t about rent control. It’s taking back control of your own city before it’s too late to protect the city you grew to love.
On Tuesday, February 18th, 2020, a number of us went to the homelessness committee meeting at city hall. It was eye opening on a number of levels.
First, our members showed up - all from different perspectives. A couple came from Globe Ave., concerned about the vagrancy crisis at Venice/405. Another couple came from behind the AmVets building, concerned about turning it into a homeless shelter. And a couple multifamily landlords showed up.
We all got to see how our issues are tied by this new housing policy and the insanity of it. Tevis Barnes, Culver City's housing administrator, was committed to the idea that the vagrants spilling into our city are actually local residents driven out by rising rents. She insisted this was the case even at the Venice/405 camp.
This assertion is our biggest bone of contention, and doesn't match personal or professional experience. When we challenged her assertion, Tevis said this was according to LAHSA statistics. Which are disputable at best. Even our own law enforcement have said most people are on our streets, not because they can't afford our rent, but because they can't afford any rent.
We have to fight them at this root level, if any of us are to have any solution to the vagrancy issue in Culver City.
Mark Lipman argued for a "housing for everyone" approach - we have close to 300 homeless in Culver City by last count. A 2br apartment for each at the HUD rate of $1944/month comes out to $7 million/year. Other committee members dismissed Mr. Lipman, and have put forward a "feasible" plan of a homeless shelter for 20 people.
The problem is, they also say that unless we have a place to send them, we can't touch them. And that place has to be within city limits. So a shelter of that size would not even put a dent in the problem. This ironically makes Lipman's proposal, frightening as it sounds, the most consistent.
Of course we countered with our own argument - namely, that if he do have somewhere to send someone, but they don't want to leave that piece of sidewalk they're living on, do we have any compulsory power over them? Both Tevis and the attending police officer said no, we don't want to be in the business of wrestling with someone into a police car and shuttling them off to a shelter.
This is the second part of the problem, which we need to address. Even if we were to have housing for everyone on our streets, we have no power to get them off our sidewalks. Most people understand this is not a tenable policy. It leads to a patchwork of unannounced rules where only the politically well connected get to have vagrant-free streets.
So we need a clear policy of compulsion, one that applies equally to both Lafayette Pl. and Globe Ave. It needs to be clearly delineated by council, and consistently applied by both the city manager and the police department. Otherwise we could build all the free housing in the world, it won't stop our streets and parks from turning into tent cities.
We need to come to terms with the fact that we are a city of limited size and resources. We will do what we can to help those who want help. We will actively monitor anyone who has actually been driven out by rising rents. We can even abide by the basic Boise decision that someone has a right to sleep on the street at night. But at some point we need to say no, you don't get to build a permanent residence on public land. We need the legal authority to compel them to leave.
Most of all, we need a council that's ready to assert that legal authority in the face of any legal challengers.
The problem seems simple, with a simple solution. Because of certain hiring practices during the 90s, we have unfunded pension liabilities that ran away with us. In order to meet them without going bankrupt, we need to extend a temporary sales tax increase, set to sunset in 2023, into 2033. If we don't do this, we're in trouble. Council saw fit to declare a fiscal emergency for this, and got this on the March ballot with a unanimous vote - the only way to get it outside a general election.
The problem is, we currently also have a council that certainly doesn't act like we have a budgetary crisis. A few hundred thousand for a coyote study, to tell us what we already know. A few hundred thousand for the first few months of their rent control board, a program nobody ran on. A million or two for Metro bike shares, when a private company is willing to pay us for the privilege. All in the last year.
And let's not talk about their plans of combatting homelessness - which sounds increasingly like building a home for everyone that stumbles into our city. A bottomless solution for a bottomless problem.
Meanwhile, they not only push for all this, they plan on pushing a business tax increase in November.
It's reminiscent of a drunk asking his dad for rent money, and then going and spending it on more booze. Worse, he goes and tells everyone at the bar what a big jerk his dad is, when he should be cleaning up and getting a job.
So in urging a NO vote on CC, we are really having a vote of no confidence in our current council and its profligate spending. It's time to tighten the purse strings.
Of course we'll expect to hear the usual scare tactics - outsourcing the police department, cutting vital and popular services. This council does it anyway, even without this budget issue. Budgets are priorities, and they reveal theirs with their threats.
The good news is, a future council is free to ask us to pass it again. Since the sunset isn't until 2023, we have a few years. A future council can put it on the 2022 general by majority vote. Or they can unanimously declare an emergency again, and hold a special election for this at any time.
We're told such a special election is a bit costly - about $100,000 to run. But we agree that some things are worth the cost.
Monday night city council proposed allowing minors and non-registered voters on city commissions and boards. We at Protect Culver City are vocally opposed to the idea. We see it not as an extension of the franchise, but a disenfranchising of Culver City residents and voters by means of court-packing. Indeed, it’s court packing of the worst kind - by using impressionable children as political pawns.
Culver City Unified was already embroiled in scandal under Kelly Kent, when she used school district resources to organize a women’s march. This is not the only case. Mayor Meghan and others from her slate frequently use our schools as an organizing tool.
We made our cases known by e-mail. And our representative Anthony Rizzo gave our position on A-2 at the beginning of the meeting. Council had the exact reaction we expected. Even with all this, Alex Fisch claimed during the A-2 “I don’t see any opposition to this.” When vice-mayor Eriksson raised the issue of verifying residence status, Mayor Meghan brushed it off.
People should see this as par for the course for an agenda-driven council whose very inaugural meeting was a Brown Act violation. Mayor Meghan regularly uses outside agitators to support her, when she wants something passed. And the majority of council under her has, over and over again, callously shut out the will of residents. Indeed her machinations to revamp our government dance around the illegal.
And Fisch’s comments, while frustrating, are unfortunately quite expected. Indeed, this council sees no opposition to what they do, because they ignore opposition to what they do. We’ve already said there is no conversation with this council – indeed we formed our PAC over this very premise. Perhaps he won on this technicality, because we didn’t realize e-mail comments aren’t read aloud at meetings. But we’re learning.
Not that it matters.
Rather, the lesson should be for the other groups who are still hoping against hope that this council will have a conversation with them and listen to reason. We’re rooting for you, and if somehow you win a concession through conversation, we salute you.
But we think it’s futile. When people show you who they are, believe them. This council has plainly demonstrated they have an agenda – one that flies in the face of the better interests of our residents. And they will stop at nothing to get it. We’re already planning for a scenario where our rent control ballot initiative passes, and council will still ignore it. Because that’s who they are.
The only way to push our interests as residents of Culver City on this council is by electoral force. The only conversation we have is with our fellow residents. That means talking with our neighbors, circulating our ballot initiative and PAC literature, and publicizing scandals like with CCUSD.
We are confident that as we make our council’s actions more public, we will continue to grow and make our voices truly heard.
The following was submitted by Jennifer Alvarez regarding council's agenda item to allow minors and non-registered voters on commissions and boards:
Culver City Council Members,
We are writing in opposition to the agenda item A-2. This will expose our young impressionable children to one sided political pressure. Children should not be involved in politics. This ordinance is not child led, its adult led in an effort to gain an extra voice to advance the LEFT's political agenda in our city. Children should not be sitting on Culver City Commissions or Committees making policy for the public. CCUSD should not be working with City Council in an effort to push our children into political issues.
CCUSD already struggles with its own politically one sided leadership that uses our children to help promote left leaning political groups and ideas inside our schools.
Kelly Kent, CCUSD former Board President, abused her power by using the CCUSD logo without permission from the district office to advertise and push a political Women's March event at Robert Frost Auditorium on April 20, 2019.
Through the California Public Records Act we were able to uncover the truth surrounding the planning of this highly political event. We exposed the overreach and blatant disregard from the district office that the use of the logo for this event was NOT APPROPRIATE. Kelly Kent obtained the logo by other means and used it anyway. Please see the link below for video of my public statement and Kelly Kent's public apology for misusing the CCUSD logo at the September 24, 2019 school board meeting (forward to 3:33).
Even after her public apology, Kelly Kent used social media to spread fake news and misrepresent my public statement. Soon after Mayor Meghan Sahli-Wells retweeted the fake news post.
This is how these elected officials running our City and schools handle opposing views. By bullying opposers. I'm afraid to think of how they will treat our children who are sitting on Commissions and Commiittees who don't agree with them.
Stop using our children to advance your ONE sided politics in our community and our schools.
- Jennifer and Danny Alvarez
While the Mayor, the City Manger, and their small band of privileged, elitist supporters insist we have a “homeless crisis” and lecture us on compassion and morality, we on Globe Avenue have to deal with the consequences of criminal vagrants and the violence they leave in their wake.
They have been at least two previous shootings in the area under siege under the 405 overpass at Venice Boulevard. One in February 2019, the other in July of the same year.
This afternoon, January 11, 2020, there was a third such incident. LAPD received reports of a man with a gun in the area.
For the residents, our first hint of trouble was the low, insistent rumble of a police chopper that sliced through the quiet of a Saturday afternoon. When we went outside—I to drop off books at a nearby library—we were horrified to see yellow crime-scene tape cordoning off our street a few feet before it intersects with Venice and a second one blocking off an alley that leads to Sawtelle.
“There’s been a shooting. Someone has been shot,” the officer I approached informed me as he lifted the crime scene tape for me to pass through.
Out on Venice Boulevard, CCPD’s black-and-white SUVs blocked the eastbound lanes. A police vehicle was parked at the head of Globe where it intersects with Venice on the Culver City side and several more vehicles were parked alongside the vagrant encampments on the Culver City side of the 405 overpass.
Two Culver City Paramedic vehicles passed by, turning left to go north on Sawtelle.
It’s taken several conversations with officers to ascertain what exactly went down.
Was this an officer-involved shooting?
Yes.
Was it the officer doing the shooting?
Yes.
Was it a vagrant who got shot?
Yes.
We understand the vagrant had a gun and thought it a good idea to resist the LAPD.
He thought wrong.
He ended up dead at the Shell Station on the southwest corner of Venice and Sepulveda.
What if he had run down Globe? What if one of us or, God forbid, our children should have been caught in the crossfire? What if any civilians had been injured?
This is why we complain about vagrants camping in such close proximity to us.
They are violent. They are armed—and, no, they're not just exercising their second-amendment right to keep and bear arms. They are dangerous.
To call this a homeless crisis is an outrage.
I grew up in India. I’ve seen extreme poverty. I’ve seen people living on the streets and in slums. I have even, as a journalism student, visited with such people and spoken with them.
Not one of them was on drugs. Not one of them was violent. Not one of them was armed. Not one of them was encased in filth either. In a country that is hot and humid and without regular access to clean, running water, these people were still able to keep themselves clean and to retain their sense of dignity.
I’ve lived in four different Indian cities, visited quite a few others.
But I have never seen human feces on the streets, never seen people defecating in full view of the public, and never, as I walked through the streets, a lone woman, have I felt unsafe. Even in New Delhi, a notoriously unsafe place for women.
Here in Culver City, I hesitate to walk under the overpass. I would certainly never take my children—ranging in age from 4 through 8—through it to go to the store at the Shell Station or to walk to Vet’s Park as we used to before the bums—I don’t apologize for using that term because that’s all they are—took over our neighborhood.
To call this a homeless crisis is both an outrage and an insult to the residents who live here and are exposed to this situation every day of their lives. To suggest that all that’s needed is a shelter and a few services—and, of course, rent control—flies in the face of common decency.
And even if there really were a housing crisis, the city’s actions—enriching itself and its cronies—would certainly do nothing to alleviate it. The Mayor has said—this in a letter in response to mine—that the city plans on spending $925,000 to study the situation.
Another $190,000 goes to pay the bloated salary of an official who will “coordinate services.”
None of this money goes toward actually providing services that those down on their luck might need—job training, job opportunities, for instance.
Why not? Because the people under the overpass don’t want a job. Nor do they want shelters. What they want is to be able to sell drugs and engage in illegal activities like drug-dealing and prostitution. Yes, we’ve seen this as well in Harry Culver’s city.
And our Mayor living in her privileged bubble is as well aware of this as you or I.
It’s easy to preach compassion when you don’t have to deal with or even see the situation on the outskirts of the city. It’s easy to tell other people what they should or shouldn’t do.
But I’m yet to see any of the people preaching compassion actually walking the walk.
Enabling drug abuse is not compassionate. Enabling young girls to be prostituted is not compassionate. And leaving the mentally ill to fend for themselves out on the streets is not compassionate either.
If anyone wants to preach compassion to the residents of Globe Avenue, let them volunteer to put up the violent, criminal vagrants under the overpass on their street—or better still within their homes.