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October 9, 2008
Santa Monica's Prop T Gets Nearly Half Million in Donations
The 10 Freeway, Looking West from the 17th St. Bridge | Photo by GarySe7en via LAist Featured Photos on Flickr
The battle over Proposition T, a ballot initiative Santa Monica voters will be voting on in November, is heating up. $428,879.00 has been raised since June by a group named "Save Our City" to oppose the proposition. 15 of the 37 givers, mainly developers, were from outside the city, according to a document Prop T proponents made.
Prop T would amend the land use element of Santa Monica's general plan "to establish an annual limit on commercial development" within the city until 2023. The working theory is that traffic can't increase much if new jobs aren't made available in new developments.
Proponents of Prop T are mostly residents who do not want to see unwieldy growth in the city and may not be able to fund their own campaign like developers are. "They’ve already raised almost half a million and the campaign has just started -- it's likely to be a million dollar developer-funded effort. That kind of spending against a residents’ initiative in this small town is an obscene abuse of our democratic process,” said one campaign consultant to the yes side.
If Prop T fails, will the alleged new development and construction be that bad? Maybe we're having a "density hawk" moment, but hey, we like more chances of living and working in a reasonable distance. Chime in the comments below.
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As a resident of santa monica, and someone who enjoys the ample opportunities provided by greater urban density -- the ability to walk to the post office, supermarket, yoga, promenade, etc., within minutes -- there are better ways of going about solving the Westside traffic problems than by placing an arbitrary quota on development.
Not all development is bad, and as a bastion of progressiveness, Santa Monica could and SHOULD institute laws, taxes, and policies to foster sustainable, traffic-friendly businesses, rather than imposing the suffocating Measure T on all future ventures in the city. While well-intentioned, there are better ways of decreasing gridlock (measure R, for one) than this flawed proposal.
Santa Monica will never be the sleepy "small" beach town it once was (or still pretends to be). And while there are a good number of sensible, progressive measures to build a sustainable city of the future, measure T is too restrictive and inflexible to be one of them.
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The opposition does not purely consist of developers. Most of the city council members, planning dept., school board, architects, businesses, and other community leaders are throwing in on the opposition to Prop T. This proposition undercuts the city's transportation plans that have come out of the LUCE (Land Use & Circulation Element)workshops, which were informed greatly by public input and direct participation by the public.
This is NIMBYism at its best. And ignorant NIMBYism. The proposition was sold to petition signees (people walking out of Whole Foods) as a rememdy to SM's traffic problems. Yet, capping future commercial development near the central downtown area (where future development should be ENCOURAGED) will NOT reduce the current traffic in Santa Monica at all. Restricting this development would harm all of the long-term transportation plan progress made at the city level this past year. If this disaster passes, it would have direct, negative impact on the speed with which lightrail to SM is realized (and it WILL eventually be realized). The county will divert funds to other transportation projects around the area, where progress is continuing, and not being stiffled by a small community that is trying to hold on to a period of time that disappeared two generations ago.
The public & private efforts put into the long-term LUCE plan will work and should not be undermined to pass this ill-concieved non-solution.
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I hope Prop T burns in flames. I am a Santa Monica resident and have been opposed to this thing since I first found out they were duping people into signing it in to existence by telling people, hate traffic, here sign this. LUCE has real solutions for Santa Monica traffic and this measure will undercut those efforts.
Measure T doesn't do anything for existing traffic, and may have marginal effect on future traffic at best. One of the points I bring up with this is what about the Santa Monica beach and pier? These are always going to attract droves of people to Santa Monica as they should, and this would be the case regardless of any new development. The same for existing job and commercial centers. There are numerous ways we could go about managing traffic on the west side, and Prop T should not be one of them.
Lets see LUCE get ratified to handle local traffic and get that subway built to get some of those cars off the 10 freeway.
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Too many jobs and too much prosperity for any one city. Prop T must put a stop to it.
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Prop T is a joke. Too bad I moved from Santa Monica, I'd love to vote against it.