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Ashley Oelsen Newsletter — September 21, 2026
🌎 Protect What You Love with Ashley Oelsen
📅 September 21, 2026
Hello, Santa Monica,
If you want to know what this city is thinking, pull up a chair. Tuesday night, more than 80 neighbors filled Diner Antoinette to talk about what is working here, what is not, and what they expect their City Council to do about it. Saturday morning, volunteers in all 58 California counties, including right here on our sand, turned out for the 42nd annual Coastal Cleanup Day. In between came an endorsement from the people who answer our 911 calls, a push to save a 550-foot piece of our history, and lawn signs sprouting on blocks I did not expect. Election Day is 43 days away, six weeks and a day. Here is your week.
🛟 Public Safety: Trusted by the People Who Answer the Call
🔹 Our first responders put their trust in this campaign: This week, the Santa Monica Police Officers Association and Santa Monica Firefighters Local 1109 endorsed me for City Council, part of their joint slate for the three open seats on the November 3 ballot. I do not take that trust lightly. These are the people who run toward the worst moments of our lives, and if you elect me, I will support the staffing and resources they need while insisting on accountability and results. Every neighborhood deserves to feel safe, and every resident deserves a city that responds when they call.
→ 📊 By the numbers: Alongside the endorsement, the two unions released a survey of the residents they serve: 68 percent say the city is on the wrong track, 43 percent feel less safe than two years ago, and 61 percent want new people willing to change how things get done. I do not read those numbers as an insult to Santa Monica. I read them as an assignment.
👉 View the endorsement post (Instagram)
🔹 The campaign's smallest volunteer had the biggest week: My son made the rounds to our Santa Monica fire stations, delivering handmade cards and asking the firefighters to support his mom. They welcomed him, showed him the equipment, and even let him climb aboard an engine. As a mother, I will remember that kindness long after November. Thank you to our firefighters, for that day and for every day.
👉 See the fire station visit (Instagram)
🌊 Our Coast: Many Hands, One Bay
🔹 Coastal Cleanup Day, by the thousands: Saturday, September 19 marked the 42nd annual California Coastal Cleanup Day, the state's largest volunteer event, with cleanups running from 9 AM to noon across every county, from inland creeks to our own shoreline. To every neighbor who traded a Saturday morning for a bag of someone else's litter: thank you. You did real science-backed good.
→ ⚡ Why this matters: What lands on our streets rides the next rain through our storm drains and into Santa Monica Bay. I have spent my career working on coastlines like ours, and I can tell you the cheapest water quality program ever invented is a piece of trash picked up before it reaches the sand. Small actions, taken together, are infrastructure.
👉 Learn about Coastal Cleanup Day
🔹 An endorsement that speaks to my life's work: The Los Angeles League of Conservation Voters, a nonpartisan environmental organization that backs candidates committed to protecting the environment across LA County, has endorsed our campaign. Of all the support we have received, this one lands closest to home for me as a conservation biologist. Protecting our coast is not a talking point in this campaign. It is the reason there is a campaign.
👉 View the LALCV post (Instagram)
🎨 Save the Whale of a Mural
🔹 A 550-foot gift to Santa Monica needs our help: My new piece in the Westside Current, "Santa Monica Keeps Losing Its Public Art. Here's How We Can Save It.", makes the case for protecting Daniel Alonzo's Whale of a Mural, the underwater world of whales and dolphins that has greeted everyone passing under the Fourth Street overpass on Ocean Park Boulevard since 1983. Daniel's Santa Monica roots reach back to 1902, and his story is remarkable: the city granted him the wall in 1982 but no funding, so he raised the money himself and painted whales up to 52 feet long with brushes about an inch wide. Four decades of sun, salt air, and tagging have dulled the magic, but it is still there, and it is worth saving.
→ 🎯 My ask: I am calling on the City Council to initiate landmark consideration for the mural, commission a professional assessment of its condition, and explore public, philanthropic, and grant funding for its restoration. More than 1,000 neighbors have already signed the petition. One important note: please do not donate through Change.org, because those dollars do not fund the mural's preservation. Your signature is what counts.
→ 💡 Why this matters: With Hispanic Heritage Month underway through October 15, this is the right moment to remember that heritage does not live in proclamations. It lives in our families, our neighborhoods, and our public spaces, and Daniel Alonzo's mural is part of that history. We have lost too much of our public art already. Not this one.
👉 Read my Westside Current piece
🧾 Sound Finances: Watch How a Campaign Handles Money
🔹 My goal is the most individual local donors of any candidate in this race: I will be honest with you, because that is the deal we have in this newsletter: asking people for money is the hardest part of running for office. But reaching voters takes resources, and how a campaign is funded tells you exactly who it will answer to. A campaign built on many neighbors giving five or fifty dollars answers to neighbors. That is the whole theory of this candidacy, and it is the same scrutiny I brought to three years of overseeing Measure V water quality spending: know where every dollar comes from, know where every dollar goes, and be able to show your work. If you have been waiting for the right moment to chip in, this is it.
🚪 From the Trail: Diners, Doors, and One Very Good Dog
🔹 Eighty neighbors, one diner, zero scripts: Tuesday night at Diner Antoinette, more than 80 of you came out to talk about this city, and nobody held back. I am having these conversations everywhere now: on sidewalks, in local businesses, and on a recent day of door-knocking in the Pico Neighborhood, where you learn more in an afternoon of listening than in a month of meetings. If you want your City Council to hear you, I am easy to find, and if you want to join us at the doors, we will put you to work.
👉 Message the campaign (Instagram)
🔹 Lawn signs are multiplying, and so are the ground rules: Seeing signs pop up across our neighborhoods has been one of the joys of this campaign, and if you would like one, just send us a message and we will drop it off. One request: signs belong on private property with the owner's permission, never in medians, parks, or public rights of way. When a few wandered onto city property last week, I went out and collected them myself, because integrity includes the small stuff. Meanwhile, Akua, my Weimaraner, has formally issued her endorsement, so grassroots is now a literal term around here.
👉 Request a lawn sign (Instagram)
🐚 Dates to Know
🔹 Tonight, Monday, September 21: Yom Kippur, which began at sundown last night, concludes at nightfall this evening. To every neighbor observing the Day of Atonement, I wish you an easy fast and a meaningful day.
🔹 Tuesday, September 22, 5:30 PM: City Council meets at City Hall, 1685 Main Street. Public comment is still the best two minutes in local democracy, and this letter is full of reasons to use it.
👉 View the latest Council agenda
🔹 Through Thursday, October 15: Hispanic Heritage Month continues citywide. Read the mural story above for one very local way to honor it.
🔹 Tuesday, November 3: Election Day, 43 days from today.
💙 Join the Movement
This campaign is funded by individual donors and powered by neighbors, and every week you prove it: at diners, at doorsteps, and on lawns across the city. The maximum contribution is $1,200 per person and $2,400 per couple, but every amount makes a difference and is deeply appreciated. If giving is not possible right now, an hour at the doors or a forwarded newsletter carries us just as far.
🌊 Onward
Forty-three days. That is enough time to change the direction of a city, and not a day more than we need. So here is my next-step challenge for the week: pick one. Sign the mural petition. Host a lawn sign. Knock an hour of doors with us. Or simply forward this letter to one neighbor who wants to understand how their city actually works. A man spent months on a scaffold in 1983 painting whales for a community that never paid him, because he believed this place was worth the effort. I believe that too. Prove it with me, one small act at a time.
💙 Ashley
