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Jefferson Tinus

A new reshaping effort for the city of Santa Monica has been approved by the Santa Monica City Council, promising to reinvigorate tourism while stabilizing the local economy. This ‘Realignment Plan’ was proposed by City Manager Oliver Chi on Oct. 27 and aims to make neighborhoods safer, keep streets cleaner and rebuild a solid foundation for generations to come. 

Chi recently transferred to Santa Monica after a four-year role as the city manager of Irvine, being the latest in a string of leadership turnovers for the position. Chi shared his beliefs that this Realignment Plan could create a ‘Santa Monica Renaissance’ and help the city get back on its feet. 

“I think when you start looking at what's happening in the city… we’re in a moment… It feels almost like the city has been knocked down,” Chi said. “The local economy, right now, is in a place where you can almost describe it as a crisis situation, since COVID-19.”

The Santa Monica Daily Press estimates that the cash reserves of the city have dropped by nearly $300 million since 2018. Chi’s plan intends to respond to this economic downturn by targeting five key areas: ensuring safe and clean neighborhoods, economic growth, affordable housing, organizational capacity and organizational health. All parts of Chi’s Realignment Plan lead back to a central goal of boosting the local economy through making the city more inviting for locals to live in and for tourists to visit.

“You listen to business owners, you listen to residents, consistently what I heard was this pervasive sense of disorder creating an environment that folks felt like Santa Monica wasn’t a place you wanted to be at,” Chi said.

This downturn in tourism, touched on by Chi, is a major part of the Realignment Plan, with new business-focused programs intending to make it easier and more efficient for smaller businesses to follow city policy. In theory, more small businesses could help tourism and use it as a form of support if tourism became more dependable. In addition, the plan seeks to bring event culture to Santa Monica through so-called ‘activation’ events. 

“Of the things we're looking to do, a monthly activation in the downtown core, where every month, there's some larger-scale event built around food, music and culture that people can rely on and work with the downtown business district to create events,” Chi said.

The creation of recurring activations indicates an intention to draw more people into the Santa Monica area, promoting tourism in a local sense, making Santa Monica a monthly hotspot. The city is already looking to expand these events, with a proposed Santa Monica Music Festival attempting to draw a large crowd of up to 30,000 and future activations utilizing existing events like the Olympics and the World Cup for promotion.

The true backbone of this Realignment Plan, according to Chi, is the series of organizational changes which intend to support the structure of the local government. Improvements to the staffing capacity of the city, and to staff benefits in general, are meant to improve the organization capacity through greater unity.

“Those external things can’t happen unless an organization is healthy enough to execute. And if we're going to execute, we have to create an environment that is consistent… and driven towards a mission to create an outcome that everyone is unified behind,” Chi said. “I think the most important element in my mind is creating organizational capacity… The plan calls for reinvestment into adding additional public safety personelle… Reinvesting in our maintenance teams… All of the things that we aim to do have to be done by people, people that are part of this city organization.”

Housing stability is also acknowledged within the plan through various policies that attempt to force usage of empty land. One student, Josephine Kim-Pearson (’27) speaks on the city dealing with housing in this way.

“I think a really important problem that the plan focuses on is affordable housing [not to be confused with government-sponsored affordable housing programs]. I’ve talked to a lot of people our age about this issue of housing and we all feel sort of hopeless. I’d prefer living here when I'm older... and I think that the work in this plan needs to be done to preserve this affordable housing,” Kim-Pearson said.

As a way to both support these new housing additions and construct a larger confidence in the community, the remaining part of the plan looks at neighborhood safety and cleanliness. Chi explains how changes instated by the Realignment Plan seek to improve these aspects of Santa Monica. 

“When you walk around the city, I think one of the reasons it feels a little disorderly is we haven't been taking care of our stuff as a city, and a lot of public infrastructure hasn’t been invested in in a number of years,” Chi said. “We have a $4 million capital plan that we're deploying… that's going to fix all of our busted sidewalks, plant trees where the trees have died… start trimming our trees again… change out signs, paint crosswalks, all of the basics to refresh the downtown core.”

Other safety-based programs within the plan include an expansion of the Downtown Service Unit, doubling the amount of patrolling officers in this unit and altering patrol assignments throughout the city to prioritize the downtown core. This comes with the addition of a police substation in the center of Santa Monica Place, at the end of the promenade.

According to Chi, residents of Santa Monica should expect to see some of these more surface-level improvements within two to three months from now; projects such as sidewalk improvements and other aesthetic changes brought about by the plan should be recognizable to the public by this point in time. The general monthly activation events are expected to begin in Feb. 2026, with more specific events like the Olympic– and World Cup–based activation events occurring closer to the dates of those events. In addition, the Santa Monica Music Festival is intended to occur in fall of 2026 and become a yearly event.

The Realignment Plan, still in its early steps, aims to improve the city of Santa Monica on many different fronts, with safety and economic concerns at the forefront of its changes.