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Little Big Man

By Jorge Casuso

August 21-- Randy Little has been all around the world, including the Arctic Circle and the South Pole, but he has found few places as clean as Santa Monica.

“There’s an environmental awareness,” says Little, the City’s new landscape manager. “It’s the cleanest city I’ve ever seen. I was very conscious when I had a piece of trash in my hand.”

Making sure there are plenty of places to throw away that scrap, and that it gets picked up if it ends up on the ground, is Little’s ultimate task.

Randy Little (Photo by Lookout Staff)

A big man who played football in college, Little is in charge of making sure Santa Monica’s public spaces, including the Downtown, are trimmed and spruced up. And although the San Diego-area native finds the 8.3-square-mile beachfront city clean, that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement.

“My main personal goal is to increase our efficiency and accountability,” Little says. “I’m learning a lot. I’m challenged and rewarded every day.”

To meet his goal, the former football player and Coast Guard member has instituted a six-step cleaning program that includes an inspection of all public facilities every 30 days. When it comes to the Downtown, staff walks all the streets, alleys and parking structures from Wilshire Boulevard to Colorado Avenue and 2nd to 5th streets.

“We look for safety hazards, fire hazards, landscaping, graffiti, the overall conditions of the restrooms,” Little says. “We find a lot of graffiti. It’s very prominent in the alleys.”

There’s also all the waste from restaurants that “throw things in the street that they shouldn’t, grease” and other garbage, Little says. “It all ends up at the beach,” which Little is in charge of keeping clean. “It’s nice to see where it’s all coming from,” he says.

Pictures of problem spots, such as an untrimmed tree or an overflowing trash bin, are photographed, taken care of and the results are again snapped for the record. Little also keeps a “baseline matrix of the frequency and duration of what we do.”

In addition, the maintenance department is installing a new “web-based” work order system that allows staff to enter requests for service and track the status of the order. Reports are then emailed to staff members informing them of the status of the work.

The system will make it easier to schedule work and should help prevent problems from cropping up by nipping them in the bud, Little says.

Little – who in addition to overseeing all landscaping and maintenance Downtown is in charge of the beach, the Pier and the Airport – is looking forward to the $1.5 million in enhanced maintenance bankrolled by the new Property Based Assessment District (PBAD).

Approved by Downtown’s 260 property owners last month, the district will be run by an overhauled Bayside Board, which will set policies for the Downtown. Although the City Council has not yet decided if the work will be contracted or done by City employees, Little is looking forward to the chance to better clean the Downtown.

The additional money will be used to pressure wash the Promenade and surrounding sidewalks more often, scrub the public restrooms more thoroughly and clean the parking structures more than the current schedule of once every eight weeks.

“It’s a team effort,” Little says. “It’s all about customer service.”

Little became interested in landscaping when he was four or five years old growing up in a 50-acre grove of avocados, oranges and lemons outside San Diego. Little remembers how “the trees looked at sunrise with the light coming off the rays of the sun. It was very spiritual.”

Little befriended the grove workers, then joined them in the field until he was 15. He played high school football and won a scholarship to U.C. Davis, playing until “both knees were blown out.”

Little joined the Coast Guard and traveled the world – Fiji, Hawaii, New Zealand, Chile and Peru. He worked in a lighthouse on the East Coast and traveled in an icebreaker to Antarctica and the Arctic.

Nominated as the hardest worker on the ship, he was rewarded with a trip to the South Pole, where, to his surprise, the scientists had set up a “full-blown vegetable garden” and “a bar with a band.” The lighting effect that attracted him to the grove as a boy made it appear as if “seven suns were on the horizon” at the bottom of the world.

When he returned, he worked for the City of Vista for 15 years, then as a landscape construction manager for a large developer.

“The economy took a horrible turn, and they had to let everybody go,” Little says.
That’s when he spotted the job opening in Santa Monica and was impressed with the work of Elaine Polachek, the open space manager for the City.

“She seemed to have a vision, and a keen sense of where the department was going,” Little says. “I wanted to be a part of that.”

 

“It’s the cleanest city I’ve ever seen." Randy Little

 

 

“We find a lot of graffiti. It’s very prominent in the alleys.”

 

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