What Santa Monica Shows About California’s Homelessness Response | Lana Negrete

Santa Monica has an international brand, but recently in the last few years homelessness has caused safety issue for the community and also has impacted the business community significantly and caused the tourism to go down as well. Today we sit down with city council member Lana Negrete from Santa Monica. She's going to tell us what the city is doing to combat homelessness and will the city have a comeback in the near future. We need to get back to a culture of the difference between what's compassionate and what's allowing unacceptable behavior. Lana, it's great to have you back. Welcome back. It's great to be back. It's been four years. It's been a long time, yeah. Great to see you. So now we want to talk to you about what's going on with Santa Monica. And you are on the city council. You were the mayor. I think you guys rotate the mayor role. And we want to hear what's happening now with Santa Monica. But homelessness is still an issue. Can you tell us what's going on in the city? Well, since I've been here, we have a new city manager. Our police chief now has been with the city for two decades, but he's now the chief. And I think that is important to mention because that relationship has changed what we see on our streets as it relates to homelessness and public safety. And homelessness was an issue four years ago when I came on the show, and it still is now. but we finally have something called a realignment plan, which is working towards addressing homelessness differently. So in Santa Monica, what's interesting, and people may or may not realize this, we are in what's called Service Provider Area 5 in LA County, so SPA 5. We have the most, we concentrated shelters and access center and other organizations that are providing services for homeless folks and some of them are is that more than skid row or or no it feels like it's one of the top places one of the top cities that people are either required to check in for the county or you know that is the only place because most cities around us don't have a shelter or they've closed it and they don't have some an access center so an access center is a place where people can check their stuff into a locker and it's low barrier so unfortunately you can also check in drug paraphernalia and drugs with no questions asked you take a shower you can wash your clothes charge your phone maybe see venice family clinic for medical care all of these things you know are services that people need who are unhoused it also provides an address for folks to get mail the issue is that if we're the only one doing that in service provider area five in la county and we have a train that ends there every night we have public transportation that comes into our city and it's also happens to be placed right off the freeway at the end where tourists and people visiting the city coming into downtown Santa Monica, you look over to your right when you exit the freeway and people are lined up to use the access center and there's what was supposed to be a temporary shelter, it's a sprung uh a facility um that's been there 30 years now And that's a congregate shelter. So those two places right in downtown, coupled with right next to it, non-profits that are running housing with wraparound services for folks who are mentally unstable, homeless, addicted to drugs. That's all happening in our city. And a lot of it is concentrated downtown. And some of it is concentrated near where I live in a part of the city that's been kind of impacted and marginalized for years. so what's happened is as other cities are closing their shelters as other cities don't have these access centers that provide services for homeless folks and as our train station ends every night in Santa Monica and public transportation takes everybody there if you're homeless and you're somewhere in the LA region and you go to inquire either online or at a center where would you go to get the services you need to either get food, medical care, shelter, or figure out if you can get into a program to get a job if you're in that point in your life. It's all going to be pointed to Santa Monica. So what ends up happening is, you know, we're not taking care of folks who have some connection to Santa Monica. In fact, I would say that most of the folks that I see when I go and ride-alongs aren't even from California. And what we're seeing is we're like this epicenter for homelessness services. So even if they're coming in just for daytime services, then they're in the streets. When you couple that with empty storefronts, then you have people sitting and lying in front of empty storefronts. You have a desolate downtown promenade and it looks like, wow, there's more homeless people than there are people shopping. What I will say has been done is our city manager, who comes from Irvine, has a very clean and safe forward-oriented position, meaning a city has to be clean and safe in order for us to bring back our economy. And so he has a great relationship with our new police chief, who's done an amazing job at reassessing how we deploy our police officers. So in the downtown area, we have doubled our police force we also have a new substation in the downtown area which i was a proponent of from day one and sub police police station a police station where they're actually deployed from and it's in our Santa Monica Place mall and so they're able to respond to things quicker they're more um prevalent in that area but we had to force hire meaning you know we were able to hire more police even though it wasn't in our current budget to get to that point we're not where we need to be quite yet, but those actions spoke volumes and they've actually been providing results. It just takes some time to catch up to it. You mentioned people come to get services. How many people come to get services and how many homeless people live in Santa Monica? Do you guys have? So our homeless count has always hovered somewhere between like 850 and just under a thousand. I don't know that those counts are really accurate because they don't take the daytime count it's a count that happens one time in january um you know presumably around the coldest time of year so that you can easily count people bedded down both in shelters and on the streets and in vehicles so they also count people in vehicles that's one night that we count people that we sort of base it on the numbers change the numbers change because people are coming in like I said, to use daytime services and they may go back to downtown L.A. to sleep. I don't know where they go. You know, in the summer, I would say I would love to do a count at different times of year in the summer because I think more people flock to the coastline and the beach. Some of the things I've been working on as an elected official, because I think, you know, we spend a lot of time pointing out the problem and voters, you know, are tired of all of this and they want elected leaders who can point out the problem with them but that's just one part of it recognizing the problem being honest about it the second part of it is in whatever elected capacity you're in like for me i'm in a charter city it's a part-time city council job we get paid roughly 18 grand a year we don't have staff support all of us are working other jobs people don't realize that you're essentially volunteering 30 40 hours a week or maybe more right that's that's how it works in this everybody puts into it what they put into it but honestly if you really want to do this job effectively and be close to the community and be responding um to your community members stakeholders residents businesses it's a full-time job um and i have a hard time not putting in 50 60 hours into it because i'm born and raised in santa monica i do not come to this being a politician before. In fact, police officers who I grew up with said, you need to be on our city council. We need someone who's from here, who's built a business here, who's raising kids here, someone who has a more relatable position. And I said, well, I didn't study policy. I don't know that I could be up there with folks who have law degrees and public policy degrees. And I've realized that my lived perspective sometimes I think is the most qualified perspective in a room. And I've realized that setting policy, we've created we've created this thing where we've made it unreachable, ununderstandable to the average person. I mean, even a parking sign is hard to read, you know, so municipal code and policymakers, we water down or we overcomplicate policy to supposedly get to a solution to a problem. and during election season people package it in these cute little nice phrases i'm going to solve homelessness create affordability you know public safety well well what does that mean to you i know on our council public safety for some of us like myself means walking out of you know to take out my trash at night and not being concerned that someone might come attack me who's inebriated But for some people, it means more bike lanes that are protected by cement instead of ballards or more crosswalks. Both are true. We need to make sure that pedestrians are safe and people who are commuting, not by car, are safe. But what I hear from people who are residents, who are business owners, is that the public safety they're talking about is crime. and what may not be considered criminal activity on paper as what we call part one crime, like rapes and murders or robberies with a gun. But if somebody's approaching you and screaming at you, I mean, it just happened to me the other day in an alley. A man came running towards me and his hand was in his pants. My daughter's experienced some things like that. Those things make you feel unsafe and have a long standing effect on you. And there is no crime. In that scenario, so people look at the crime statistic and say crime is down. Right. But then there's no crime happened, but you see something like that, you assume that it's not safe. We're having like public code of conduct issues, if you will, or, you know, how do people act in public? And we're seeing folks who are experiencing severe mental health issues, and they're probably self-medicating with drugs. and the type of drugs that are on the street and especially if you're unhoused and you whatever you're buying on the street to get through being homeless possibly in a city and a state that you're not even from so you have no community around you no family what we're experiencing is quality of life issues that go far beyond just oh i don't like seeing someone unhoused sitting there on the street or sleeping this is what i'm talking about people who are defecating in public, exposing themselves, screaming and yelling and scaring people because we're reading in the paper every week, you know, stories that that person's not just screaming. It could end up being an altercation or somebody physically attacking you. You never know what's going to happen. Because they're unwell. I mean, 30 years ago or when I was a kid taking the bus, we always had homeless people in Santa Monica, but they were drunks or smoking marijuana and the way they acted was you know a little bit less offensive than what we see now and so I just say that to say that like a lot of lawmakers use the phrase the perception of crime but perception is real perception stops people from shopping at your store like I own a small retail shop it's a music store and we often have people sleeping using drugs or using the bathroom in front of our store. We definitely focus on young children who take music lessons. Parents are not going to want to come into our music store or drop their kids off or let them walk to their lesson if they feel like that is happening in front of our store. We've also been robbed more times in the last few years than we ever were and we've been in business over 55 years. So these are real concerns for me as a business owner but also as a parent. My daughter takes public transportation to get downtown on the train and she takes the bus everywhere and I want to be able to feel safe that when she's on the bus there's not a chance that she might be attacked or be chased off the bus or whatever the case may be but as it pertains to Santa Monica in terms of solutions I think you know there's layers of who's in charge of what so that's what we really want to get into to understand where is the money going how does how are we dealing with homelessness who's responsible for what so in the city of Santa Monica we do provide funding to um non-profits specifically there's one non-profit that takes the lion's share which is the People Concern our city gives millions and that helps support programming because we realize that you know doing nothing um is not going to help the situation we're going to have homeless people in our city whether we like it or not public transportation is a large part of that as i mentioned earlier the metro ends every night in santa monica any city that has a metro that's especially if they're at the end of the line like long beach has this problem because when they let people off the train they have nowhere to go you the shelter is not a none of our shelters you can you can't go up and knock on the door and say hi i don't have anywhere anywhere to sleep can i come in. You have to be referred in by either police or fire or somebody who works in the space. So the money that we've been spending has been providing roughly 60 beds at a shelter, like I was talking about, and some services that happen through their access center. But of those 60 beds, only 10% of them are reserved for people who are directly connected to Santa Monica. Either they lived here, they had an address here at some point, they work here, They have children that go to school here. And so if you think about that, then where are the other 50 beds going to? Who are they going to? That's what I was talking about, where we are a regional support. So that 1,000 people, the 850 to 1,000 people, where do they go? They just have to sleep. Well, there's other beds in other places throughout the city. Again, not all of them. Malibu sends homeless people and buys beds in our city at the shelter. so other cities are paying into some of the shelters that are hosted or places that are hosted specifically in santa monica so we become a regional support system and we understand that like you know they're human beings you don't draw lines in the sand and say oh you can't come here because you're not from here it's also really hard to find when where was your last address however we do have to be seriously questioning the region la county and saying hello santa monica cannot bear the brunt in an eight square mile city that is suffering economically all of the homeless services and centers you have to start helping us move those into other areas so our lease is up for the shelter like i said it was supposed to be temporary a long time ago and congregate shelters even people in the um shelter organizations and people that work in homelessness they agree through you know testing and years of experience that that system doesn't work well if you have PTSD from living on the streets and you have other issues and you go into an open space with cots not only can it be an environment that's not successful for someone who's going in there with issues but also it feels unsafe for them many women won't go in people are afraid to even go to sleep because they're protecting their stuff you know that's they can only bring in so much stuff, so they're protecting it all night. So they've realized that a better system where you have a little bit more semi-private rooms is the future of shelters, if you will. So the city of Santa Monica has said, we need to buy into beds in other locations to disperse this responsibility. And so that is something I'm in support of. Many people say, then what happens to the people there? There's a process and that organization works with the county to make sure that everybody in there gets placed somewhere that might be the next step for them. A congregate shelter, they may have lived out that experience and they might be ready for some temporary housing or some other program. And so once that happens, then we want to start purchasing beds in where they're available and sitting empty in other communities. And by the way when we do that those beds if we're not using all of them and from Santa Monica they also support the whole region so what we're saying is like the financial ripple effect and impact of us hosting all these physical places is far greater than if we just take some money and invest in putting people in shelter beds that are better well ran with programs that actually get people to getting addiction crisis help or mental health help. And that's a far greater investment than us continuing to be the one city that is hosting over a dozen facilities. Are you guys able to afford handling that 1,000 people, 850 to 1,000 people? Or is that something that is very hard to do? It is. And like I said, I would presume that it's actually more. The daytime population of unhoused folks is probably far greater than a thousand people. That's just a point in time count that was just under that. It was maybe between 750 and 800. But we know that more people come during the day, like I said, to get services. And, you know, these facilities also are not able to handle it all. A few things that we've done in Santa Monica, I pushed really hard in 2024 and 25 around the metro station. The metro is in charge of the platform and the train. So even though we have three stops in Santa Monica. Our police officers cannot go onto the platform or the train and interact when there's criminal behavior going on, which I know seems crazy to people because they would say, the police are right there. Why can't they do anything? That's their jurisdiction. So the Metro has started a police department. It is going to take some time to staff up. They're hiring around a thousand police officers. In the meantime, last year when I was mayor um our city manager and myself we had some discussions his team and our police department has had further discussions and they've created a memorandum of understanding an mou a contract that i don't know that it has wet signatures yet but even before it got signed um our police officers are starting training to learn what the code of conduct is so that they can help the metro right now and help ourselves by getting onto the platform and the train and checking for people who aren't following code of conduct, if you're doing criminal behavior or even just misbehaving on the train, that they're helping address it. But more importantly, fare evasion. So next year in the summer of 2027, Metro will be installing in Santa Monica the taller gates for fare evasion, which means at night when you get off, if you didn't pay and you rode to the end of the line, you're going to be stuck in that area and you will be met with folks who are prepared to talk to folks at night and connect them with services to where they need to be but no longer will you be able to just ride the train and then end up in santa monica wandering around the streets a lot of cities when we had the court case when you couldn't arrest people if they were sleeping in the street a lot of that court case got the supreme court yeah that just changed a couple of years ago a few years ago are you guys doing that do you have to have housing right is that is that how it works you have to have so we're taking more a more proactive approach where our officers are engaging with folks and i want to remind people that sometimes police and fire are the only human contact that a homeless person has right so because someone calls 9-1-1 or they're having some sort of medical issue that might be the only opportunity someone offers them help and i want to be clear that especially in santa monica and i think in a lot of cities, our police officers have moved from focusing on law enforcement to really becoming like crisis counselors for homeless people. And we actually have a special division called a Homeless Liaison Program, which are a set of officers who have regular interactions with regular people. And it sometimes takes a dozen or 20 interactions before someone accepts services, because that's the biggest issue. And that goes to this layered approach of the state of California, Like, we can't force anyone to go into a shelter. And honestly, I think most of these people on the streets, they don't need a temporary shelter or just a shower or a bed or a million-dollar apartment by the beach with wraparound services. Which is really, a lot of people question that when the cities are building, when there's apartments that are a million dollars and then you know what rents are, you know. Right. Or what the cost of land, like, is that the best use of your land value there? What I will say, though, that gets confused as some people assume that all affordable housing is just putting people who are from the streets, you know, doing drugs and defecating. and then now they're going to go right into this million dollar apartment not exactly how all of these programs work not to say that there isn't some of that happening but i will just say that in Santa Monica I propose closing our beaches down at night because I think it's unsafe for anybody we've had everything from dead bodies uh we've had a rape occur and we've actually with our machinery ran over people because at dusk in the fog it's hard to see anyone if they've buried themselves in the sand to sleep there so it's unsafe for the person sleeping there and it doesn't make sense from a liability standpoint and it's not that if at midnight you're sitting there just having a rough day and you want to sit at the beach the cops are going to tell you hey you can't be here it gives them a tool though to approach people who might be bedding down on the beach and saying hey that might be that one interaction that that person accepts help at that moment. I have been on many ride-alongs where they have said, we reached out to this person 18 times, they have declined help, and today they took it. So sometimes we just need to give our officers and our public safety folks the tools to be able to engage with someone. So if the beach was closed at night, it doesn't mean someone couldn't jog at three in the morning because the police aren't going to say, hey, why are you jogging here? It gives them a tool set to say when someone has a sleeping bag and bedrolls to say it looks like you're sleeping here tonight we have places you can go they may not be in Santa Monica but there is somewhere where the place exists they exist and to your point about building things so right now um our council voted on this realignment plan which was a 22 point plan that kind of was bookended by ramping up our public safety officers to address quality of life issues and like we were talking about before maybe things that aren't you know arrestable crimes but they're creating unsafe or quality of life issues erratic behavior you know people think just because you can buy cannabis legally you can't go sit in the park and smoke it out in public so addressing some of these lower level crime issues are cleaning up some of the like public disorder you know we want to create a space that's welcoming for families and tourists and residents alike. And we can't have that if everyone's just sort of sprawled out and they've got their trash everywhere and no one's addressing that. Like, hey, you can't litter. You know, that's an infraction or a ticket. And if you keep doing that, people get the message that, hey, you can't just come and sit around and, you know, light a big joint and leave your trash everywhere in Santa Monica. That's the message we want to send. That, you know, we can't arrest you for being unhoused or homeless per se but we will be talking to you if you're screaming at the top of your lungs and creating a situation where people don't want to be here you're going to be met with an officer who's going to first offer you help but if you have drug paraphernalia if you have tools that look like you know you're committing crimes and there's a connection to it you you are going to be met with the full extent of the law if you're breaking the law i want people to understand that you don't get arrested for being homeless but if you are committing a crime if you are using illegal drugs or if you have weapons on you you are going to be met with the law and law enforcement and so the next step in that though is what actually happens to people right so they can arrest them and we have this new system now where you know it's been in effect for a few years this magistrate where they're just going to be released in a couple of hours for a long time i think that set this tone where it was frustrating for officers to do all this work and not see the results of it. But we're realizing that if you just keep doing that, it sends the message to someone that, you know, hey, I don't want to go to Santa Monica and do that because even though I'm released in two hours, this is stacking up and these infractions or tickets are becoming warrants. And then it does become jail time for someone. But going back to housing development around homelessness. So we have an affordability issue. And what we're seeing is development of these really large structures that change the entire character of our city. And when they're downtown, that's one thing. But when they start to encroach in the neighborhoods, that's a whole entirely different other thing. We're not looking at infrastructure like water, trash pickup, parking, all of these things. But more importantly, when you talk about who's living in there. What's frustrating is people like myself, I live in a rent controlled apartment and we're sort of trapped there because we don't, our income isn't such that we would be approved for subsidized or affordable, an affordable apartment. And because, you know, my income fluctuates in the arts and sometimes I don't pay myself in my music store as an owner, you have to income qualify. And so if you have to do that every year, that's also an issue. But we also don't make enough to afford a $10,000 a month or $7,000 a month apartment. So we're stuck in this what's called missing middle of working class families who aren't finding apartments that are large enough to raise a family and really affordable enough for you to commit to paying such high rents knowing they're going to go up every year. So you're sort of stuck in either finding an older dilapidated building like the one I live in that's poorly maintained, but it's rent controlled and it's in a great neighborhood. And you just hang on to that for dear life because buying a home is nearly impossible now, even east of Santa Monica and even outside of California at this point, it's just out of control. So when you see a development that's got, you know, what they call some affordable units. So if there's a hundred units in there, 10 of them will be affordable, but affordable for who these are people who have been on a list forever and have to meet a certain income requirement and oftentimes it's not the folks that live in Santa Monica that are working in Santa Monica that would like to also live there like teachers or just you know blue-collar workers in our city and so when you hear about a development going up for a shelter people get really frustrated because do you have to put it in the beach do you have to put it right there so like there are some things we can't control like people get upset about like so who decides that is it you guys or is it the county so oftentimes there's a private property like we had this happen on Ocean Avenue there's a an owner who owns a property and they will go out and say hey like they might want to do something else with that property in the future but in the meantime how do you get um an income that you can depend on that's consistent every month and yield the highest income for that property? Well, one of the easiest ways is to contact the county and a nonprofit where they need shelter housing, right? Not everybody who owns property wants to open a shelter. Most, maybe most people don't. And it's pretty hard for the county and these nonprofits to find a space to put a shelter, to put these facilities and to address people, to bring them inside, to address homelessness. So when someone offers, which in this case, that's what happened on Ocean Avenue they're building well a non-profit's not going to say no to that and i felt sorry for this non-profit because they actually do great work someone offers them hey we have a building that you can put your folks in here and we'll help you get a grant from the county so the county goes in and you know gives them the money the non-profit goes in and runs the program and really because it's all allowed to happen under the the use permit there's nothing the city can do so the city cannot even ask any questions but but in this case we were able to intercept because there was some other issues around how many people were going to be living in there and and things like that but oftentimes these things happen and it's private property owners um and we have that situation now like we have a situation where we've we've said now we want to close the shelter down we want to disperse some of the beds elsewhere we also are putting out a bid to folks outside of Santa Monica and inside to say hey we want to invest in this regional issue but we don't want to be the ones always building it in our city there's never going to be an area that's more appropriate for it there's homes or businesses by that area and so that's one of the issues we're seeing when it comes to building affordable housing with wraparound services i think one of the issues that we're seeing that I know I'm experiencing is there's tend to be concentrated where land is the cheapest which happens to be where the most blue-collar working families are so when you have a two-block radius where all of these affordable housing units are going or folks who were homeless maybe had addiction and mental health and now they're at the next phase where they can sort of live independently but are reliant on services you're concentrating a bunch of people with these issues in one area and then you have across the street an apartment building where a working class single mother you know her kids have to come home before after school before she gets home and they might be also living in a building amongst people who have severe mental health issues issues living independently and so you know it's it's interesting when you have a city who's wanting to do the right things and their heart is in the right place but you have to ask yourself, first of all, are we actually helping the people that are going in there become independent citizens? And if there's somebody who has severe mental health and drug addiction, shouldn't they be getting that help first before we consider the idea of them living in an apartment in a city that, by the way, when they walk out their front door, they might have this apartment. How are they going to afford a cup of coffee when down the street, a latte is $11 and a sandwich is $20? How are they going to be able to afford living within this city that is extremely expensive just to, you know, shop and eat and live in. It's an interesting concept to me that why doesn't the state of California and the county of Los Angeles, just talking about our area, invest in hospitalized care? People need hospitalization. When you have lived on the streets for a decade, when you have been self-medicating with meth and the type of drugs that we see on the market today that are literally eating brain matter. I mean, you are disabled at that point. I don't even think people can go back to work if you've spent a decade on meth or fentanyl. And what we're saying is like, let's just get them off the streets and put them into an apartment. I just door knocked yesterday and met a man who said he had been homeless for 10 years. He said it took him over two years and he never did drugs. And he said, I don't have any severe mental disabilities. I lost my job. I got into depression. But ultimately, he said it took him two years to figure out how to live indoors. So the idea that we're taking people who are potentially self-medicating with really horrible drugs and have mental health issues and who just came from living on the streets and had to stay up all night to protect themselves and deal with the elements of the streets. And now we're going to put them into an apartment and go, someone's going to meet you a couple times a week and give you an hour session and check in and make sure that you have your documents and certain paperwork filed. I don't think that's getting anyone better. We have people who are angry online pointing at the issues, blaming elected officials, and not really truly understanding what measures they're voting for that's funding certain things that aren't giving us the results we need. they don't even understand what elected officials can do either in their local community like a lot of people don't understand how important the county supervisor is in LA County there's you know five county supervisors most people don't know who they are they don't even know who they are and they don't understand that they are you know really powerful and have a huge budget to affect real serious change um when it comes to homelessness and right now our county supervisors are re-looking at LA in LA and how we look at the homeless issue and breaking that apart, which is right now we're seeing a lot of funding going away from these nonprofits. And I think the immediate results are there's a surge of homeless people because shelters and facilities are closing down out on the streets. And I think California needs to get really serious about, I know this sounds crazy and you know I might regret saying this out loud but I've always wondered why we can't when we do our homeless counts and we know on a weekly daily basis there are non-profits collecting data we know how many people are not from California we actually have a program we work with in Santa Monica called Homeward Bound that gets people a plane ticket and connects them back home into services back home because we know that if you're around your community you have a better success rate at getting better. And I just wonder at what point, when does California start taxing or finding other states and saying, we have 75 people that we've spent $2 million on from your state, and you do not have the services in your state to help this person. And fine, if you're going to have them here in California and we're going to be taking care of it, then we're going to bill you back for some portion of it. Because it does feel like California is hosting a lot of other states' issues. So we have a lot of issues that are at a state level, really need to be addressed with our state leaders. And I just don't hear a lot of talking about this issue around drug addiction and homelessness and these programs that are just cycling people out. I would say that California and Los Angeles is servicing and providing a lot of services to homeless people, but we are not solving any of it. So we're servicing the issue and that is a business and it keeps going because we keep bringing people in from all over the nation to service them, give them beds, give them a food program. Oh, we have this shower program. All of these things are working in silos, servicing these issues, but we haven't figured out how to solve it. So some of these issues are great. Like, yes, people need to be able to charge a phone and they need to be able to check their emails and they need to be able to shower and wash their clothes if they're going to get a job but that's just one program that's being funded and oftentimes we're not getting a record back to say how many of those people that you're giving these services to are actually ending up independent parts of society how successful is this program or are you just servicing hundreds of people every year if you just say hey we fed a million you know we fed 800 people and offered 300 showers to people okay but who are those people is that the same people who are repeat customers are they new people what happens to those people afterwards if a shelter is saying you know we see a thousand people a year and we're um servicing them in what capacity are they getting off the street are they getting off the street is the question and so if we don't really crack down addressing the laws on the books meaning when you're out in public you cannot pull down your pants and urinate in the middle of the street you cannot sit on a park bench and use illicit illegal drug paraphernalia you cannot go into our public libraries and watch pornographic material like these are things that we should be unacceptable you know and we need to get back to a culture of the difference between what's compassionate and what's allowing unacceptable behavior and i think politics get in the way and people are afraid especially elected leaders to say this stuff because somehow expecting people to be respectful in public becomes a political ideological issue and it isn't you cannot run a city that can provide housing for working class folks that can't afford it provide libraries for people who need access to books and computers. You know, provide open spaces and parks for a city that's predominantly renter-based or 71% renters. You can't do those things if you're not safe and you're not clean and businesses don't want to open there and people don't want to, you know, if people are moving out and not paying their property taxes, if businesses aren't opening and if our travel and tourism is down, which is one of the largest parts of our general fund, we won't have the money to do all the lovely things that we want to do to help people. And so I think that's where we're at in Santa Monica. We are getting back to the basics. We are power washing for the first time now the last few months, our public parking lots in the downtown area every three days. We started investing in a service called Chrysalis that takes folks who were once homeless, once addicted, who are now working to power wash streets. And it's starting at the epicenter downtown and moving outward. And we are being more proactive in our policing and more present in our downtown area by increasing our patrol units. We have an additional substation. We're overhiring. And we launched a nurse practitioner unit, which is through our fire department, a van that when they come in contact with someone who has mental health or addiction issues, there's a nurse on that vehicle that can give them medical care right away, which takes the pressure off of an emergency room and our hospital. And it also takes the pressure off of a fire engine and our EMS team responding to a homeless person who might be having a mental health crisis and so that they can go respond to a traffic accident or a heart attack or a fire. And it also allows us to transfer that person outside the city of Santa Monica to a care facility that might be better suited for them. And that's what we need to continue to do but in order to continue to do that we need local elected leaders who are unafraid to say that that's what needs to be done so you are here you're bringing this message and you're speaking about it how come you're doing that so i'm born and raised in my city um and we're working class folks my husband and i are raising our family in santa monica we can we can't even afford to live there. We're in this rent controlled apartment, like I said. And I'm just seeing some really common sense, practical, pragmatic issues be overlooked. And I'm stealing this phrase from a friend who's on the Coastal Commission and a council member in Hermosa Beach who said, you know, we have seven council members. So four votes is the majority. And every other Tuesday we meet. And it's four votes on a Tuesday that changed the trajectory of our eight square mile, 90,000 resident city. And in some of our precincts, only 40% of the voters turn out. And in some election years, less than 45% of the voters who are registered turn out to vote. And so my message to people is get involved in your local politics because I never saw myself as an elected official and I still don't. I don't consider myself a politician. I consider myself a community advocate. And I think if we get more people who are bringing pragmatic solutions at the local level, you may decide that you want to serve in higher office. Everyone gets their start somewhere. But more importantly, when we have people pushing up on the county and the state, we can get results. Lana Negrete, city council member from Santa Monica, it was great to have you back on California Insider. Please come back and update us in the near future. Yes, thank you. Thank you for having me. Tell us what you think about this conversation with Lana. When was the last time you were in Santa Monica and what was your experience like? Make sure to tell us in the comments or email us at [email protected]. We read all of your emails and comments. I'm Siamak Pourami. This is California Insider. We'll see you next time.