First of three parts

July 25, 2024 -- The City of Santa Monica has mismanaged the interrelated public safety and homeless issues for almost two decades. City leaders would have us believe that the current conditions are somehow the new normal. The ongoing narrative that the “city is NOT unsafe” has been managed through active avoidance of hard, objective and visible metrics and analyses.

This effort to manage the narrative surfaced in the recent back and forth Lookout Opinion pieces written by Mr. Cody Green, Chairman of the Santa Monica Police Officers Association, and former Santa Monica mayor Ms. Judy Abdo.

I’d like to begin by providing some clarity on the City finance numbers that were referenced in each of these recent editorials.

Clarifying The Numbers

On July 11, the Lookout published Mr. Green’s opinion piece titled “Santa Monica Massively Underfunding Its Police Department.” The following day, Ms. Abdo critiqued Mr. Green’s analysis in “Back to the Calculator, Please.”

In her piece, Ms. Abdo attacked Mr. Green’s analysis by saying “Santa Monica's total general fund budget includes many amenities and services other cities are unable to provide. For instance, Manhattan Beach doesn't have its own bus line, or a municipal cemetery. Glendale has no Pier. Huntington Beach, Culver City, and Beverly Hills do not operate an airport.”

This much is correct. However, Ms. Abdo incorrectly asserts that Mr. Green’s calculations “lump them all, and even capital improvements to City facilities, into an inaccurately aggregated ‘general fund’ against which the police union calculates appropriate expenditures on police.”

In fact, a review of Mr. Green’s calculations reveal that he accurately includes only General Fund amounts in his calculations. Santa Monica's FY25 adopted expenditure budget totals $750.6 million, of which the General Fund comprises $458.6 million, or 61%. The $292 million difference includes all the other non-general fund (or “Enterprise”) items mentioned by Ms. Abdo.

There were some minor discrepancies in Mr. Green’s charts. The Torrance ratio should have been 32% instead of 35% and the Huntington Beach ratio should have been 31% instead of around 34%. The differences are driven by items in the respective cities’ budgets that were separately included and therefore not fully reflected in Mr. Green’s analysis.

That said, a quick check of the annual budgets used in the charts confirms that only the General Fund amounts for each of those cities had been used. And, like Santa Monica, those General Funds also exclude those cities’ Enterprise Funds, as is standard municipal financial reporting practice. So, for being a simplified analysis, the numbers used were generally like for like.

Inexplicable Confusion

It's not clear why a former mayor, with a city governance background, would have confused these basic budget concepts.

It’s also not clear why Ms. Abdo introduced a discussion of Santa Monica police officer compensation levels. The pay arrangements she cites were put in place during her time on the Council, which ended in 1996. Their necessity seems to be confirmed by the fact that they have been maintained by all the City Councils since then.

It’s also not clear why Ms. Abdo introduces a recruitment issue in this discussion. As is, the police department hired 55 new officers over the last 24 months using standard recruitment processes. To the extent staffing levels were to be increased, additional initiatives could further scale recruitment, including more aggressive recruitment budgets.

Why such challenges surrounding issue clarity?

As Mr. Green notes in his Opinion Piece, the City has chosen to manage this issue in a political fog by not following through with any independent analysis of just how many police officers Santa Monica actually needs.

Like many other contentious issues in Santa Monica, the City policy preference is to avoid hard, objective third-party metrics used in transparent analyses that foster clear decisions, progress measurement, accountability and the ability to course correct when needed.

The absence of such an objective process conveniently allows for the endless, and apparently desired, paralysis-inducing debate about the impact of the tourist component on the statistics. Obfuscation has long been a tactic to allow other agendas to be pursued.

The elevated number of crimes that now occur in our 8.3 square miles occur in the same area that the residents call home and that businesses are asked to invest in. In this regard, I do, however, disagree with Mr. Green that “Santa Monica is by no means an unsafe city.”

The crime data and the downtown commercial devastation forcefully argue otherwise. Not only does neither group feel safe, but closed storefronts, and lost city revenue, are a silent and constant reminder of the consequences.

Editor's note: Marc L. Verville is a Sunset Park resident who is Chair of the City's Audit Subcommittee. The ideas expressed in this Opinion piece are his own.

Next: PART II: The Issues