Statement

By David Ganezer

I am open to any resident of Santa Monica and anytime. I am on your side, even if it means shaking up the City Hall, it's unions and the SM city bureaucracy.

As a newspaper publisher who hears from readers, I understand there's a segment of the population that is underrepresented: Small Businesses.

Our city has proposed a sales tax that will harm small businesses and make it more expensive for low-income people to afford vital supplies. Raising revenue through an unneeded tax is not the answer. We must reduce government spending, something the City claims it is working on, but has failed to do.

The 2010-11 budget includes $255 million in spending, a 1 percent increase from the previous year. That is a strange version of cost cutting.

In every City department, by far the highest costs are salaries. There are too many employees, and some of them need to go. Cut the cost of each department aside from fire and police by 10%, and you're on a good path toward sustainability.

Also, City management is currently in negotiation with employee unions about City workers sharing the cost of pensions and healthcare. City management cannot back down on this. These costs continue to go up every year and will bankrupt Santa Monica unless they are curbed.

Let's reduce the amount of the parking tickets, and give people longer to pay them. Using tickets as a way to raise revenue is a lazy method. Like the proposed tax, it is another way to avoid cutting costs.

Santa Monica is in the process of revising its zoning code. It is essential that rules are put in place to keep big developers in line and to make them pay proper public benefits in exchange for the right to build in our beautiful City.

I am no friend of Santa Monica's wasteful government. If you elect me to join it, I will shake things up and make an already great city even greater.