The Business of Santa Monica

   In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge famously said, “The business of America is business.” Five years later, American business crashed and took the nation down with it. 
   In recent years, the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce, laboring under the misapprehension that the business of Santa Monica is business, has gone to the barricades again and again to fight City Hall and/or residents on issues as various as preferential parking and the Living Wage. Its posture has been aggressive, its attitude litigious. “Do it our way, or we’ll sue,” has been the cry. 
   In fact, the business of Santa Monica is life — in all its colors and variations. 
   To its 86,000+ residents, Santa Monica is, above all, home — the place we have chosen to love, live in, enjoy, celebrate and preserve. We have unusually high expectations. We expect our schools to be superior, our air, water, and ocean to be clean, our institutions open and just. Sometimes, we are disappointed. 
   The most recent City survey showed that less than a third of Santa Monica residents who work actually work in Santa Monica. For a majority of us, then, booming business generates more problems than profits, and crowds mean trouble, not fun. This is not to say that Santa Monica residents are anti-business, it is simply to say that we see business as part of the whole, not the whole thing.
   If the Chamber understands that Santa Monica is more than a money mill, more than the obedient servant of business interests, it has not demonstrated it recently. In the last two years, at dozens of hearings, dozens of residents spoke in favor of a living wage ordinance. The Chamber not only opposed the proposed ordinance but pushed Prop KK, which would have required only employees of City contractors to be paid a living wage, as well as stripping the City Council of the power to enact any further living wage legislation.  Though almost $1 million was spent promoting KK, nearly 80% of Santa Monica’s voters opposed it. Soon thereafter, the Chamber began talking about hiring a P.R. person to improve its relations with residents. 
   The Chamber doesn’t need a P.R. person, it needs to understand that residents do not want the city they love to be turned into a product. 
   Ironically, Santa Monica was born as a real estate development and City Hall was run — until 1981— by business people who did everything in their power to “sell” Santa Monica, and failed. In1981, when Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights (SMRR) took power, deposed business leaders raged. But the so-called anti -business,”radical” SMRRs have done, in 20 years, what the business people failed to do in 100 years and turned Santa Monica into a business bonanza. In spite of the volatile national economy and energy crisis, business has never been better, and the relatonship between business and residents has never been worse.
   With the recent resignation of Chamber Vice President Dan Erhler, point man for most of the Chamber’s recent assaults on City Hall, and the upcoming inauguration of Anne Greenspun, the new Chamber president, the Chamber has an opportunity to take a new tack, see Santa Monica whole, lower its voice, moderate its positions and begin finally to work with residents rather than against them.