Who Rules?

   From its founding in 1982, the Santa Monica Convention & Visitors’ Bureau (CVB), whose sole task is selling Santa Monica to tourists, has been underwritten by the City. The City has spent many millions (some estimates put the total at $180 million) tarting up the Santa Monica Pier, the Third Street Promenade, Palisades Park and the beach front to make them more appealing to tourists. Though the city’s population has actually declined in the last decade, ever-increasing crowds of visitors have required the City to spend more millions to rebuild and expand its infrastructure to accommodate the transient throngs. City, state and federal funds underwrite programs to augment the low wages paid to many workers in tourist businesses.
   City residents who do not benefit an ounce from the tourist boom tolerate all manner of inconveniences, disruptions, traffic snarls, sky-rocketing rents and miscellaneous diminutions in the quality of their lives — in the name of good business. 
   No wonder, then, that the tourist industry sees itself as the star of the show and the city and its residents as mere supporting players. 
   Thus it was that last fall when the City proposed a Living Wage ordinance, the Chamber of Commerce, the hotels and some tourist-oriented businesses howled with outrage, filled the air with prophesies of doom, and mounted a million-dollar campaign to pass a counter-measure which would have restricted the living wage to employees of companies doing business with the city and stripped our elected representatives of their power to regulate wages. 
   The effort failed. Work on the ordinance went forward and it is on its way to becoming law. Now the Chamber and its allies have announced a new campaign, under a new name — Santa Monicans Fighting Against Irresponsible Regulation (FAIR) — and are once again soliciting residents’ campaign contributions as well as their signatures on petitions to place a referendum on the ballot.
   FAIR leaders have already said that if the referendum effort fails, they will challenge the Living Wage in court. Some hotels and businesses are currently backing a Charter amendment (VERITAS) — which would radically change the structure of City government by mandating the popular election of the mayor, the division of the city into Council Districts — with each District electing its own representative to the Council, and term limits.
   The Chamber also recently went to court to block the imposition of a preferential parking zone which would have prevented auto dealers’ employees from parking on residential streets. The court ruled against the Chamber, but no one thinks the battle is over. 
   The stated theme of the recent Chamber installation dinner was “2001 Chamber Odyssey: A Venture in Harmony.” Given its increasingly bellicose posture, a more apt, and honest, theme would have been “2001 Chamber Odyssey: We Rule!” 
   At last week’s Council meeting on the fiscal year 2001/02 budget, the Council voted 5 to 2 to end the City’s $2,740 annual membership in the Chamber of Commerce, citing its consistent opposition to City policies and programs. But it simultaneously increased the annual CVB allocation from $1,000,000 to $1,050,000. 
   The Council might have simultaneously ended its subsidy to the CVB, but the tourist bed tax is a significant source of City revenue and the primary function of the CVB is to fill those beds, and so the City, like the Chamber, chose to rank business ahead of principle.
   It was City Hall’s insatiable appetite for additional revenue which triggered the tourist boom in the early 1980s — with the creation of the CVB and the Hotel District, and the imposition of the bed tax. Naively, City officials thought they could orchestrate the boom, but soon found themselves — and the rest of us — being controlled by it. 
   The American landscape is littered with once-lovely and unique places which have been transformed into pathetic caricatures of themselves by an insatiable tourist industry. Cape Cod, Miami, Aspen, Santa Fe, Laguna Beach, Carmel — the list is as long as it is sad, because it is the nature of tourism to multiply and subdue everything in its path. 
   The increasingly militant posture of the local tourist industry suggests that it aspires to write and direct this civic drama as well as star in it. To allow that would not only be wrong, it would be disastrous — for all of us — including the business community, and ludicrous. 
   In the 1980s, our elected representatives ceded too much power to the tourist industry because they were greedy. Our current representatives will have to act quickly and far more boldly than they have to this point to undo what their predecessors did and restore balance and equity to city governance.