1 David Yakobson
From: Zoe <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2025 12:36 PM
To: councilmtgitems
Subject: Re: Big Blue Bus Violations Continue
EXTERNAL
I want to bring it to the E, G, 12, 13 Items.
Thank you.
On Tue, Feb 11, 2025 at 12:19 PM councilmtgitems <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Zoe,
Regarding the email below, was this tied to any specific item on the agenda, or did you wish to keep it under general public comment?
David Yakobson
Staff Assistant III
(310) 458-8211 x2066
santamonica.gov
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From: Zoe <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, February 10, 2025 10:26 PM
To: Anuj Gupta <[email protected]>
Cc: councilmtgitems <[email protected]>; Lana Negrete <[email protected]>; Douglas Item 13-A
February 11, 2025
Item 13-A
February 11, 2025
2 Sloan <[email protected]>; Josh Kurpies <[email protected]>; [email protected]; Ramon Batista <[email protected]>; David Gardinier <[email protected]>; Darrick Jacob <[email protected]>; Edgar Sernas <[email protected]>; Caroline Torosis <[email protected]>; Jesse Zwick <[email protected]>; Ellis Raskin <[email protected]>; Natalya Zernitskaya <[email protected]>; Barry Snell <[email protected]>; Dan Hall <[email protected]>; Clerk Mailbox <[email protected]>
Subject: Big Blue Bus Violations Continue
EXTERNAL
Hi Anuj,
On January 22, 2025 on my way to Church in Line #2 Bus 1311,Driver 21524. The driver was so rude an unprofessional that I left the bus leaving behind an important item On my way to Mass at St.
Monica Catholic Community at 12:10. It was so triggered and traumatized that left behind something in the bus of value. A little bad with thank you cards for my Mother's Memorial mass, and a crystal water bottle from Beyond H2O.
Last Saturday February 8, 2024 at 12:34 Pm, Driver 19765 Line #1 Bus1818 on my way to the Apple Store for a photography class at the 3rd Street Promenade.
I need you to review the incidents.
Kindly reply,
Zoё Muntaner
“Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?"- Tao Te Ching IMPORTANT WARNING: This email (and any attachments) is only intended for the use of the person or entity to which it is addressed to and may contain privileged and confidential information. You, the recipient, are obligated to maintain it safely, securely, and confidentially.
Item 13-A
February 11, 2025
Item 13-A
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3 Unauthorized re-disclosure or failure to maintain confidentiality may subject you to federal and state penalties. If you are not the intended recipient, please immediately notify me by return email and delete this message from your computer.
--
Zoё Muntaner
“Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?"- Tao Te Ching IMPORTANT WARNING: This email (and any attachments) is only intended for the use of the person or entity to which it is addressed to and may contain privileged and confidential information. You, the recipient, are obligated to maintain it safely, securely, and confidentially.
Unauthorized re-disclosure or failure to maintain confidentiality may subject you to federal and state penalties. If you are not the intended recipient, please immediately notify me by return email and delete this message from your computer.
Item 13-A
February 11, 2025
Item 13-A
February 11, 2025
1 David Yakobson
From: Hajar Muqtasid St. Claire <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2025 11:58 AM
To: councilmtgitems
Subject: Item 13A Support
EXTERNAL
Please continue to support the work of the working group and provide a budget if possible. The working group has volunteered hundred of hours over the last 2.5 years and invested their resources for this work they were directed to do.
The Social Justice/ Equity in Preservation Landmarks/ Committee for Racial Justice Working Groups framework is significant because it is an important step forward to ensure social justice for directly affected Santa Monica residents and communities, disenfranchised, underserved and historically excluded populations in Santa Monica whose labor made and continues to make Santa Monica what it is today.
Santa Monica Landmarks Commission Subcommittee for Social Justice/Equity in Preservation and the Committee for Racial Justice invited individuals and many organizations to join an open dialog on a new social justice framework that will weed out white supremist tactics in the City’s historic preservation program by ensuring that the histories of Indigenous Black Americans, other people of color and all marginalized communities are properly recognized in the Landmarks Designation process.
Council, the working group, wants to emphasize that many of our recommendations are abstract and that the Committee for Racial Justice wants to continue to work with the commission and staff in order to drill down and make the recommendations concrete programs so we can make sure the intention is preserved.
We have started developing a social justice framework for historic preservation and the designation process in the CRJ/ Landmarks Commission Working Group. A Social Justice framework is apart of repairing the harm. As you support the recommendations and the continued working groups’ work, have social justice on your minds and in your hearts, not just storytelling.
Lead the way to repair and reconciliation councilmembers. --
Hajar Muqtasid St. Claire
Item 13-A
February 11, 2025
Item 13-A
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1 David Yakobson
From: Gilbert Portillo
Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2025 12:35 PM
To: Kaitlin Drisko; Stephanie Reich
Cc: councilmtgitems
Subject: Re: Item 13 2/11/2025 - Landmarks Commission Recommendations to Create a Framework for Social Justice/Equity in Preservation
Hi Kaitlin,
No problem! I am forwarding this to the Council meeting public comment mailbox.
From: Kaitlin Drisko <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2025 11:45 AM
To: Stephanie Reich <[email protected]>; Gilbert Portillo <[email protected]>; [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: Fw: Item 13 2/11/2025 - Landmarks Commission Recommendations to Create a Framework for Social Justice/Equity in Preservation
EXTERNAL
Hello Stephanie and Gil,
We had a typo in the original message in the title of the Subcommittees report.
Can you replace with this one for the public record?
Thank you!!!!
RE: City Council Agenda Item 13
Landmarks Commission Recommendations to Create a Framework for Social Justice/Equity in Preservation
2/11/2025 Council Meeting
Dear City Council,
The Santa Monica Conservancy enthusiastically supports the recommendations in A Place for Everyone in Santa Monica's History, Final Report from the Working Group on Social Justice/Equity in Preservation to the Santa Monica Landmarks Commission and City Council. We believe the seven recommendations made by the Committee, if acted upon as a whole, will give a voice to diverse groups that have not been adequately represented in the narratives we have traditionally told about Santa Monica history.
The recommendations define a deliberative and collaborative process that engages community members who have been historically excluded from civic discourse about representation in the telling of our city’s history and what is presented as “historically significant”. The recommendations also address how research and reporting can be conducted to ensure that stories and voices that have been excluded from, or misrepresented in, our current historic context nonetheless emerge and are recognized. Most importantly, the recommendations suggest creative solutions for inclusive community engagement by Item 13-A
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2 staff and commissioners to ensure new voices participate in the City’s Landmark program and tell their own lived stories in their own voice.
We hope to hear that the Landmarks Commission, city staff, and the CRJ will continue to work together to implement these recommendations and that you add the Santa Monica Conservancy to the list of advisors to decision-makers on these issues. The Conservancy and its Preservation Resource Center are here to raise awareness of heritage conservation for all Santa Monica community members, and there are key areas where our expertise and experience with the city’s preservation program can add value to the development of actionable practices that are inclusive. We would like to be part of the solution.
The recommendations were a result of a two-year study that included a great deal of listening, and the recommendations propose to embed continued listening into the Landmark Designation process in new ways that could serve as a model for other city programs, much like the City’s Acknowledge and Reframe Initiative for the City Hall Murals. Finally, we note that positive action on this report is timely and affords an opportunity for heritage conservation to have an important place in the City's efforts to develop a Citywide Equity and Social Justice Plan.
Sincerely,
Mario Fonda-Bonardi
President
Santa Monica Conservancy
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1 Edgar Sernas
From: [email protected]
Sent: Saturday, February 8, 2025 7:28 PM
To: councilmtgitems; Lana Negrete; Caroline Torosis; Jesse Zwick; Dan Hall; Ellis Raskin; Barry Snell; Natalya Zernitskaya
Cc: Nina Fresco; Dolores Sloan; Pam O'Connor
Subject: Item 13A: Working Group on Social Justice/Equity in Preservation Report
EXTERNAL
Dear City Council,
As a member of the Working Group on Social Justice/Equity in Preservation, I am excited to see our report, A Place for Everyone in Santa Monica’s History, before you tonight. That it appears on the same agenda as a Reparations Study Session and during Black History Month is apt as it presents the first concrete proposal for directly addressing a specific program broken by systemic racism in Santa Monica. I hope that it can be a model for how we look at all city programs to ferret out white supremist bias.
It is not hard to see how the ways we research history and weigh certain events are shadowed by assumptions and methodologies that keep erased stories hidden and undervalue the lives and accomplishments of people who have been passed over by traditional historic narratives. The Working Group, comprised of members of the Committee for Racial Justice and the Landmarks Commission, took on the work of figuring out on a practical level where the broken parts are so we can target them for rethinking and repair. We devised seven recommendations.
Staff has identified three of the seven recommendations that can be implemented with existing resources. Those all relate to how we can ensure that outside consultants, commissioners, city staff, and the public who play roles in the implementation of our Landmarks Ordinance are engaged in deeply reflective work that strives to keep imbedded personal bias from influencing outcomes. This will have to be ongoing work as the cast of people participating will evolve over time.
The heavy lifting comes when we are committed to changing the way evaluation of historic places is actually done. The remaining four recommendations address the way we conduct research, the way we evaluate that data, and who has access to the program. First, improving our Historic Context Statement would mean that significant themes previously ignored become standardized.
Second, adding a focus on people in research methodologies is a pathway to finding buried stories that were systematically hidden in their day. Current research methodologies are influenced by long-standing bias towards white supremist norms of how we define “significance,” which this will help turn around. A third recommendation ensures that through a new kind of outreach we bring Item 13-A
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2 a diverse perspective to the evaluation of landmarks nominations regardless of who is on the commission or staff at any given time.
The heaviest lift of all is the establishment of local guidelines for preparing nominations for designation of historic resources. The proposed city-endorsed document would not only standardize the six other recommendations of the Working Group, but it would make our preservation program accessible to a range of new people with stories to tell, stories we need to hear. We learned in our listening sessions that there are many people in Santa Monica who know and have lived the stories of communities underrepresented in historical narratives and our landmark registry. They never thought historic preservation could have anything to do with them.
They never discussed preservation, thought about it, or considered that places significant to them might be valued by the whole community. Local guidelines that reflect professional standards in preservation would walk both novice and professional applicants through presentation of narratives that support the designation of significant places in straightforward language. It’s not enough that we stand at attention when we discover a new story, we have to open up the program to more people so they can tell their own stories.
These are not easy fixes. Even the simple recommendations push us to do things we thought we were already doing differently and more deeply. The Working Group recommendations are conceptual and will require the Landmarks Commission, city staff, and the CRJ to continue to work together to implement them in a way that is genuinely responsive to the intention behind each idea.
That reforms to our Historic Preservation Program came forward first is ideal because understanding our history gives us the perspective to recognize how we are going wrong in all kinds of ways today. It is foundational to the next steps in the city’s progress to anti-racism and a place where we no longer have racist norms built into our systems. I hope you will agendize immediate action on this tonight so direction may be given for us to get to work on the next phase.
Sincerely,
Nina Fresco
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1 Edgar Sernas
From: Hajar Muqtasid St. Claire <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, February 10, 2025 11:18 AM
To: Gloria Garvin; Dolores Sloan; Pam O'Connor; Amy Beth Green; Roger Genser; Jodi Summers; councilmtgitems
Subject: Item 6A
EXTERNAL
Landmark Designation of the Tucker House 1958 20th Street To the Landmarks Commission,
I am delighted to support the Landmark Designation of the Tucker House. Built in 1937, the Tucker House is highly significant for its association with Santa Monica’s Black community.
Key reasons to support this nomination include:
Cultural Heritage: The Tucker House was a catalyst for Black ownership in its immediate vicinity. After the residence was built, other middle-class African Americans began to purchase lots and develop new housing around Virginia Avenue and 20th St.
Architectural Significance: The Tucker House was designed by architect Paul Revere Williams, the first Black architect west of the Mississippi. The residence was built in the American Colonial Revival Style, typical of Williams’ designs and early 20th-century architecture. Paul R. Williams taught himself to draw and do blueprints upside down due to the racist climate he faced during his professional training and career.
Social History: The Tucker House is connected to four historic persons who have had a remarkable impact on Santa Monica history. Marcus O. Tucker Sr., who commissioned the residence, was the first Black physician to practice in Santa Monica. His wife, Essie McLendon Tucker was a schoolteacher, community activist, and property owner. She was president of the NAACP Santa Monica-Venice Branch.
She also recruited doctors and dentists to work at Marcus O. Tucker’s medical practice on 424 Pico Blvd.
Marcus O. Tucker Jr. was a youth advocate and Santa Monica’s first African American Deputy City Attorney. Indira Hale Tucker was a community activist and historian. Indira established the Marcus O.
Tucker “Black Men of Courage” book collection, which is currently housed at the Santa Monica Public Library.
The impact of the Tucker family goes beyond the above accomplishments. This recognition is long overdue. I urge you to support this nomination especially during Black History Month.
Thank you for your time.
With gratitude,
Hajar Muqtasid St. Claire
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