🌟 Santa Monica Weekly with Councilmember Lana Negrete

📅 May 4, 2026

Hello, Santa Monica,

Last Thursday night, twenty-five neighbors walked into a room at City Hall to spend two hours learning how their own city government actually works. The first cohort of the One SaMo People's Academy. Two hundred and sixty-three people applied for those twenty-five seats. That ratio tells you something real about where we are right now, and it tells you something about the version of civic life I have been pushing toward since the day I was sworn in.

This week brought a lot of that same work in different forms: a long-debated lease vote on the Pier I want to walk you through honestly, a summer events calendar that may be the biggest Santa Monica has ever produced, a Public Safety Snapshot that keeps moving in the right direction, and a beach parking fix that finally lets you park past 8 p.m. and actually watch the sun go down.

Pull up a chair. Here’s what we got.

🚨 Public Safety

🔹 Public Safety Snapshot, April 19 through 25. Calls for service eased slightly this week, while proactive enforcement kept climbing. Year-over-year arrest activity is now up 75.8 percent.

→ 📊 What you are seeing: Sustained staffing, real coordination across patrol and specialized units, and the SMART Center now feeding live data into deployment decisions every day. A 75.8 percent year-over-year jump in arrests is not a fluke. It is what showing up consistently looks like in the numbers.

🔹 Notable incidents this week:

• 🥊 Assault on an officer at 4th and Pico. A subject discarded drug paraphernalia during a pedestrian stop, attempted to assault the officer, fled, and was ultimately taken into custody.
• 🏠 Residential burglary on 12th Street. A suspect forced entry through a rear door while the resident was out of the country and ransacked the home. Investigation ongoing.
• 🛍️ Organized retail theft arrests at Lululemon. Multiple suspects from the Promenade theft series were located after fleeing. A perimeter was established and five suspects were arrested for grand theft, conspiracy, and felony evading.
• 🔫 Concealed firearm recovered on the 2000 block of Ocean Avenue. Officers contacted an occupied vehicle, observed narcotics indicators, and recovered a firearm under the driver's seat.

→ 🎯 My take: That Lululemon arrest is exactly the kind of outcome we were promising when SMART Center came online. Fast perimeter setup. Live information across units. Five suspects from a regional theft crew off the Promenade. This is what I keep pushing for, every single budget cycle.

🔹 Traffic enforcement. A citywide bike and pedestrian safety detail produced 26 traffic stops and 21 citations this week. Separately, officers in the 1500 block of 4th Street attempted to stop a subject riding a motorized bicycle on the sidewalk. The subject refused to stop. After a brief chase, they were arrested on a no-bail warrant along with narcotics and burglary tools.

🔹 Homelessness response and a Project Homecoming I want you to know about. This week, HLP officers contacted a Marine Corps veteran who had been listed as missing and was experiencing homelessness in Santa Monica. Working with the Salvation Army and the veteran's family, the team coordinated shelter, clothing, and a bus ticket back home through Project Homecoming.

→ 💡 Why this matters: Project Homecoming is one of our oldest and quietest homelessness programs, running since 2006. In 2025 alone, it reconnected 75 people experiencing homelessness in Santa Monica with verified family or friends willing to take them in. Since inception, more than 3,200 reunifications. The model works because it is built on verification: a real receiving plan, a real support system on the other end, and trusted outreach providers doing the work day in and day out. People do not just leave Santa Monica. They go home, to someone, with a path forward.

🔹 A few other operational notes worth flagging. HLP also coordinated overnight outreach on the 2300 block of Oak Street after resident concerns about people sleeping in vehicles, resulting in multiple Safe Park referrals plus citations and tagged-abandoned actions on unregistered vehicles. A separate camping enforcement contact on the 800 block of the Bluffs led to a narcotics arrest after a search revealed methamphetamine, fentanyl, paraphernalia, and burglary tools.

→ 🎯 My take: Connect the people who want help with the resources to accept it, and hold the line where help is being refused and the public space is being damaged. That two-track approach is the only model I have ever seen actually move people inside, and I will keep saying so.

🔹 Fire Department snapshot.

• 279 calls for service last week, 5,604 year-to-date, 43 calls in the most recent 24-hour period
• This past Saturday, May 2, I attended alongside councilmember Hall and Zernitskaya the 2026 Recruit Academy graduation. Sixteen weeks, capped by training in confined-space rescue, EMS, and a memorable visit from former Chief Jim Hone.
• 121 annual fire inspections completed and 27 alarm and sprinkler reviews. Quiet, daily work that keeps buildings safe.

🔹 #BeWaterAware launches across May. Drowning is one of the most preventable causes of death and one of the most painful when it happens. Our Community Aquatics team is leading a citywide push throughout May, with Free Hands-Only CPR training at the Swim Center on May 16, Fire Service Day at Station No. 1 on May 9, and an inaugural Sandcastle Competition and Ocean Safety event at Lifeguard Tower 4 on May 31, complete with stingray shuffle lessons and rip current safety. Take the Safe Swimmer Pledge with your kids before summer hits.

👉 See the full Water Safety Month lineup

🔹 The first cohort walked in last Thursday night, and I could not be prouder of how this began. Twenty-five Santa Monicans, seven weeks of two-hour Thursday evening sessions at City Hall. The opening covered the City Manager's Office, the City Attorney's Office, the City Clerk's Office, and our internal service departments in Finance, HR, and IT. I was there to welcome the cohort and walk through how the pieces of city government actually fit together.

→ 💡 Where this idea came from: Honestly, this started with the small two-hour tours of City Hall for our youth I started giving when I got on Council. Elementary students. Middle schoolers. High schoolers. College kids. What I noticed every single time was that the parent chaperones were just as engaged as the students, sometimes more. People want to understand how this place works. They are not getting the chance. The People's Academy is the version of those tours scaled up for the adults who kept asking the same good questions.

→ 💡 Why this exists: Before this role, I did not know half of what I know now about how City Hall operates. That is the problem. Understanding government should not be reserved for a few circles. City Hall is your house. If we want a deeper bench of informed neighbors, business owners, and community leaders ready to shape what comes next, we have to teach the building, not gatekeep it.

→ 🎯 My take: Two hundred sixty-three applications for twenty-five seats tells me there is real hunger out there for this. Real curiosity. Real willingness to engage. The next session, on Thursday May 7, focuses on City infrastructure and sustainability. Subsequent weeks cover public safety, transportation and land use, housing and human services, and community programs. Another cohort is coming, with 25 more seats. This is just the beginning.

→ 🎯 A note on the people who built this: Big thanks to Sergio Ramirez and Sandra Santiago in the City Manager's Office for the work pulling this program together. Programs like this do not happen on their own.

👉 Learn more about the One SaMo People's Academy

🔹 The California Roadhouse vote on Tuesday: a clear-eyed walk-through. There has been a lot of confusion about what actually happened, so here is the transparent version.

→ 📋 The setup: Rusty's Surf Ranch closed before this lease was ever on the table. The space sat vacant while the City worked to find a new operator. California Roadhouse was selected through a competitive process to invest in the space and reopen a key Pier location. Then, during lease negotiations, pressure mounted to apply right-to-recall requirements, which would mandate that this brand-new business hire from a workforce tied to the previous one.

→ 🎯 My take: Let me be very clear, because at the meeting this may have sounded like we were simply giving people their jobs back. In reality, this is a new business, not a continuation of the old one. That raises a fair policy question: should the City, as a landlord, dictate who a private business must hire when that business is starting from scratch? Over a year later from the previous business closing?

→ 💡 A note on unions and this situation: Unions matter. Fair wages, safe conditions, and worker advocacy matter. But this case raises real questions about how that influence is being applied. The previous business was unionized about ten days before it closed, after operating for years without that structure. Now, before a new business has even opened, there is pressure to apply union-driven hiring requirements from day one. That shifts the conversation from protecting existing workers to pre-determining how a new business must operate before it hires its first employee.

→ 🎯 The bigger picture: This is not about being for or against unions. It is about balance. We should protect workers. We should also allow new businesses the runway to build their teams, set their culture, and succeed. If we get that balance wrong, we risk discouraging the very investment and economic activity we are trying to bring back, especially in places like the Pier that need thoughtful revitalization. We all want good jobs and thriving local businesses. The question is how we get there without creating unintended consequences that make it harder to open the door in the first place.

🔹 Summer 2026 may be the biggest events lineup Santa Monica has produced in recent memory, and it kicks off this weekend. The City announced a packed summer calendar that begins Friday with the inaugural Santa Monica International Jazz Festival (May 1 through 9), a partnership between BroadStage, SM Festivals, and the City built around Stanley Clarke and BroadStage's vision to restore premier live music to the City by the Sea.

→ 🎵 What is happening at the Jazz Festival:

• A free community concert on Third Street Promenade on Sunday May 3, featuring Billy Mohler, KNOWER's Genevieve Artadi, and Elijah Fox
• A ticketed main event on Saturday May 9 at Tongva Park, headlined by Grammy winner Kamasi Washington alongside Stanley Clarke and Friends, Miles Electric Band, KNOWER, and Sam Smylie

→ 📅 What follows through summer (a partial preview): The Michelob ULTRA Pitchside Club on the Pier from June 11 through July 19 anchors free 2026 FIFA World Cup activations. Pride Month programming across June, plus Pride on the Promenade on June 13. An expanded Juneteenth celebration on June 19 and 20. The inaugural Make Music Santa Monica! on June 21. The Pier 360 Beach Festival on June 27 and 28. The Fourth of July Parade on Main Street, paired with a brand new Fourth of July event by producer Revel Republic. The reimagined State of the City on July 23. And in September, a two-day ticketed Goldenvoice festival on the beach.

→ 🎯 My take: This is what the Realignment Plan looks like in practice. Use our brand, our public spaces, and the right partnerships to bring people in, lift our local businesses, and build civic identity for the people who actually live here. The operational complexity is real. Our staff is taking it seriously. So am I.

👉 Browse Santa Monica's full summer 2026 lineup

🔹 Beach parking lots now stay open until 9 p.m., effective May 1. For years, residents and visitors have asked the same question: why do the lots close before sunset? As of Friday, the answer is finally, "they do not." DOT's Parking Division is administratively extending closing time at most beach lots from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. for the summer, and a more comprehensive set of changes is heading to Council next month, including making the extended hours permanent, aligning summer and winter hours with daylight saving time, and pushing Lot 1 South (next to Hot Dog on a Stick) to 11 p.m. year-round to match Pier business operations. Annenberg Lot and Lot 1 North are unaffected.

→ 💡 Why I love this one: Some of the best things government can do for residents are the ones that come straight from listening to them. Watching the sun set over the Pacific is one of the defining experiences of this City. Now you can actually park to do it.

👉 See full beach parking details

🔹 A wave of new business activity worth knowing about:

• ☕ Cotti Coffee filed a plan check for 1351 Third Street Promenade. Cotti is now the third-largest coffee chain in the world, behind only Starbucks and Luckin, and just entered the U.S. market last year. Their selection of the Promenade alongside their NYC and LA debut sites puts Santa Monica on a very short list of U.S. cities they are targeting.
• 🏫 Seven Arrows Elementary is moving to a permanent home at 3420 Ocean Park Boulevard for the 2026-27 school year. They are one of five Palisades-area schools that relocated to Santa Monica office properties after the January 2025 Palisades Fire, made possible by Council's emergency order waiving CUP requirements for fire-displaced schools. Property owner BXP is excited to keep them in our community.
• 🌐 The Business Concierge Team met with the flagship Google Santa Monica store this week. The store employs 24, sees real international visitor flow (notable from Japan and Brazil), and the team is working with Google on a series of free small business workshops at the store. More to come.

🔹 A small but meaningful save: 1212 Restaurant. On Monday, the owner of 1212 flagged to DTSM that Southern California Edison had scheduled a daytime power outage on May 4 from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. that would have impacted multiple downtown businesses, including a confirmed client event. DTSM looped in Economic Development, who connected with Public Works, who reached SCE and got the daytime outage cancelled until further notice.

→ 🎯 Why I share this: This is the quiet, unglamorous, cross-departmental work that makes the difference between a small business making payroll and a small business losing a booking. Nobody calls a press conference for it. They should.

🔹 The 12th Annual Arts & Literacy Festival drew its largest crowd ever. Saturday April 25 at Virginia Avenue Park brought more than 1,000 attendees over four hours to a festival built around this year's "A Day on the Farm" theme. Co-produced by our Virginia Avenue Park team and the Santa Monica Public Library in partnership with SMMUSD and Venice Family Clinic, the day featured 55-plus interactive booths, a Festival Explorer Card kids could trade for a free book, more than 600 books distributed to children five and under, hourly storytime with guest readers including Mayor Caroline Torosis and Fire Chief Matt Hallock, a petting zoo, sack races, and a Main Stage of youth performers. I stopped by to connect with staff and residents on extreme heat preparedness and youth volunteer engagement.

→ 💡 Why this matters to me: This is what kindergarten readiness looks like when an entire City shows up: multiple departments, the school district, neighborhood organizations, healthcare partners, and hundreds of families, all gathered for the simple, foundational work of helping young children start school strong. As a mom, I do not take for granted what it takes to put a day like this together.

🔹 YALLWEST hit twelve years and 700-plus readers. Our Library's longstanding partnership with the YALLWEST Teen Book Festival continues to be one of the most reliable engines for getting young people excited about books and writing. The Library's "Fierce Friday" preview at the Main Library drew nearly 300 attendees and 11 featured authors. The next day at SamoHi, Library staff connected with more than 400 teens and young adults at the SMPL booth, with a separate sustainable indigo tie-dye activity through the Art of Recovery program drawing another 60 participants.

🔹 A small water jug, a bigger story. The City contributed a "Drink Santa Monica Water" glass jug to Pozzotive 250, a limited-edition batch of low-carbon cement alternative being produced from recycled glass collected across all 50 states for America's 250th anniversary. The technology can replace up to half of the cement in concrete, which matters because cement production is responsible for about 8 percent of global carbon emissions. Our piece of glass, a vessel that once held our most fundamental local resource, will literally help build the country's next century of infrastructure. A modest contribution. An unusually poetic one.

🔹 Earth Day at our Community Gardens. Our six community gardens contributed 260 pounds of produce and flowers to Community Corporation of Santa Monica partners this past month, with Ishihara Garden alone donating nearly 150 pounds the same day it was harvested. On Earth Day, more than 20 Amazon volunteers returned for a second year at the Main Street Community Garden, building a Pollinator Perimeter, replanting an ADA-accessible plot, and constructing raised beds specifically designed for elderly gardeners. Real, hands-in-the-dirt community.

📅 Looking Ahead

🔹 Tuesday, May 5: WilMont candidate forum. The WilMont Neighborhood Coalition will be introducing City Council candidates Tuesday evening. If you live in the Wilshire-Montana area, this is your chance to meet the people running and ask the questions that matter to you. Show up.

🔹 Wednesday, May 6: Planning Commission housing study session. The Commission will hold a study session focused on three implementation questions central to the Realignment Plan, including how to focus new housing development in Downtown, how to incentivize housing along commercial boulevards in ways that fit with adjacent residential neighborhoods, and how to maximize the potential of City-owned sites Downtown and across the Gateway Master Plan area. Input from this session will be incorporated into a formal Resolution of Recommendation to Council. This is an early but meaningful step in shaping how we pursue responsible housing growth in the years ahead.

👉 View the Planning Commission agenda

🔹 Thursday, May 7: People's Academy session 2. Infrastructure and sustainability week for the inaugural cohort.

🔹 Saturday, May 9: a Saturday with a lot stacked into it. Three institutional milestones plus the Jazz Festival main event:

• 📚 The Main Library turns 20, with a community celebration at 601 Santa Monica Boulevard
• 🌱 The Main Street Community Garden turns 50, where our citywide community gardens program began in 1976
• 🚒 Fire Service Day at SMFD, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., bring the kids
• 🎷 Santa Monica International Jazz Festival main event at Tongva Park, with Kamasi Washington headlining

🔹 Tuesday, May 12: Police and Fire Memorial at the Public Safety Facility, honoring those who serve and those we have lost.

🔹 Saturday, May 16: Free Hands-Only CPR training at the Santa Monica Swim Center, part of our #BeWaterAware May campaign.

🔹 Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Downtown Santa Monica Farmers Market (Wednesdays), Pico Farmers Market (Saturdays), and Main Street Farmers Market (Sundays). I am usually at one. Please say hi if you see me.

📱 Stay Connected

Got an issue to report? Want to make sure the city hears you?

👉 Report an Issue

If you haven't already, be sure to follow me on Instagram too for behind-the-scenes updates, event highlights, and my thoughts along the way as I continue to go on this journey with you.

👉 Follow me on Instagram

🔹 Book time with me. Virtual, in-person at City Hall, or catch me at the farmers market on weekends.

👉 Book Office Hours with Councilmember Lana Negrete

🌟 Closing Thought: Stay in the Room

The People's Academy is part of how I am thinking about civility this week. Not the polite-conversation version. The real version. The kind that asks you to sit in a room for two hours, seven weeks in a row, with neighbors you may not agree with on every issue, and try to actually understand the system you are about to push, vote, organize, or speak inside of. That is harder than yelling at a screen, and it is also how anything actually gets built.

The California Roadhouse debate is another example. It would be easier to call it pro-union or anti-union and move on. The honest version is messier, and it deserves the messier conversation. Same with how we balance new investment, worker protection, and the long arc of what kind of Pier we want a decade from now. None of those questions has a tidy answer. All of them deserve the harder one.

Transparency is the part where I tell you what I think, including when I am still working it out. Civility is the part where I keep listening, especially to the people who disagree. I am asking the same of you. Show up. Ask the question. Stay in the room. Be kind. That is the muscle this City needs, and it is the one this Academy is quietly trying to build.

See you out there in the sunshine, Santa Monica. 💙

Together, we're building a Santa Monica that works for everyone — a city where families can thrive, businesses can grow, and community comes first.

With gratitude and determination,
Lana Negrete
Councilmember, City of Santa Monica