Palos Verdes Estates

My Fellow Neighbors,

The moment to determine the future of Palos Verdes Estates has come. Measure PF has failed, and we are once again without a plan. Predictably, our city council has proposed a new tax to fill the gap. Instead of this, I ask you to remember what this city was always meant to be.

We live on the American Riviera, the most beautiful stretch of coast in the world. Yet we have built almost nothing worthy of it. This is not the fault of the land; it is the fault of how we have governed it, and so the grievances must be named plainly:

• That three restaurants are not enough to feed a city of 13,000.
• That our few gathering places give more ground to the parking of cars than any semblance of community life.
• That we have no square worthy of our name. Malaga Cove stands as a crumbling car park, a poor relative of the Bologna square we modeled ourselves after, all while practically every building sits vacant or surrendered to real estate offices.
• That there is no hotel, no café, not one gracious room where one might take a coffee and watch the sea.
• That the tall and grand flags on the Malaga Cove Triangle, raised in tribute after 9/11, have been replaced with weathered miniatures.
• That again and again we are driven off our own hill to meet the ordinary needs of life, exiled from the very beauty we call home.

Our founders imagined none of this. They drew from Bologna, from the French Riviera, from the cliffs of Amalfi, believing a place this rare deserved beauty equal to its setting. That vision was never abandoned by choice. The Great Depression interrupted it, and in the ninety years since no one has resumed this work. Until Palos Verdes is again walkable, adorned in mosaics, statues, and marble to match our greenery, with streets that invite us to linger, we have failed to build a city of sufficiency.

The remedy is already in our hands. We should invite restaurants, cafés and businesses worthy of the American Riviera, each on leased ground, each paying the city rather than the city taxing its people. Imagine California’s finest hotel on our coast: small in footprint, serving perhaps a hundred guests, offering an experience unmatched in the state. Whatever we build must be the best of its class; nothing less is suitable. We can keep the land in perpetuity while solving our deficit and keeping every benefit of our police force. The discussion we owe ourselves is how to raise revenue by improving our city, another tax will not stop the aging of our buildings. A council whose only remaining answer is to bill its residents has stopped governing and started invoicing.

I know the fear of building runs deep, and much of that caution has been wise. No one wants cheap buildings that only complement the decrepit car parks around them. But there is a difference between preserving a city and letting it crumble. One is preserved; the other is abandoned.

So I call on our city council to engage the will of the people, and solve this problem without another tax. Measure PF was a citizens’ initiative in name only. Should no action of sufficiency be proposed, I shall personally lead a second, citizen-led initiative to remove this city council in its entirety and place a new charter before us, with a governance structure that represents the needs of this city and the future of its citizens.

No one is coming to save Palos Verdes. We will save it ourselves.