Kelly Olsen

The homeless and their advocates were left out in the cold this week when the Santa Monica City Council backed a plan to close Palisades Park at night, ostensibly to reduce drug traffic there. By a 5-2 vote Monday, the council ordered the city attorney's office to draft an ordinance to close the cliff-top park from midnight to 5 a.m., dealing a harsh blow to the many people who sleep there.

Stereotyped as having no concern for the world today--except when watching world premiere videos on MTV--today's teen-agers aren't given much credit in the area of current events. Hot Topics asks, "Do you think the world will be a better or a worse place 100 years from now?" "It depends on how we start handling things now. People have the ability to make it better, but it's just whether we take advantage of the opportunity."

The Santa Monica City Council majority backed by the renters' rights group that dominates local politics faces a big political gamble Tuesday when it considers a 12,000-signature petition demanding a vote on proposed get-tough homeless policies. Petition organizers, who are longtime opponents of Santa Monicans for Renters' Rights, want to put the law-and-order proposals on the November ballot. To do that they need the verified signatures of 10% of Santa Monica voters, or about 5,400 signatures.

The Santa Monica Police Department has started to enforce the city's new park closure law, issuing scores of warnings on Sunday and three citations since then to people in parks after midnight. Police Sgt. Gary Gallinot said the enforcement push followed a monthlong effort to inform park regulars that it is now against the law to be in the parks between midnight and 5 a.m.

The Santa Monica City Council has rejected Councilman Kelly Olsen's proposal to immediately assign police officers full time to Palisades Park to stop persistent drug dealing in the coastal bluff-top park. Instead, the council voted 5 to 2 to ask Police Chief James T. Butts to devise his own deployment plan for keeping peace in the park while taking into account public safety needs in other parts of town.

Santa Monica City Councilman Kelly Olsen has been bumped from the slate of the powerful renters' group that elected him four years ago--the first time the group has failed to endorse one of its own incumbents seeking reelection. The surprising turn of events capped a spirited, well-attended Sunday convention of the coalition, Santa Monicans for Renters Rights, which has long been the dominant political force in the city.

The Santa Monica City Council will conduct a special study session in coming weeks to examine how a new ban against sleeping in local parks will be enforced in light of the city attorney's continuing insistence that the measure unconstitutionally targets the homeless. At the request of Councilman Herb Katz--a persistent critic of City Attorney Robert M. Myers--the council unanimously approved holding such a session with Police Chief James T. Butts, perhaps as early as next week.

Faced with criticism that they were conducting city business in the middle of the night because of their own long-windedness, members of the Santa Monica City Council faced a choice: Talk less or start earlier. Being politicians, they chose the latter, agreeing unanimously Tuesday night to begin their meetings an hour earlier at 6:30 p.m., starting Jan. 26. Council rules say meetings are supposed to end by 11 p.m., but in practice 11 o'clock is just the shank of the evening at City Hall.

Yielding to the pleas of local restaurateurs, the Santa Monica City Council on Tuesday passed a law that bans smoking in restaurant dining areas but permits it in restaurant bars. The law, modeled on the Los Angeles ordinance that took effect in August, makes no distinction between bars that are physically separate from dining areas and those that abut them.

On Nov. 23, 1993, the Santa Monica City Council approved the Civic Center Specific Plan with a unanimous vote, ending a four-year struggle between the RAND developers and controlled-growth advocates. The plan had been in a constant state of revision, culminating in a 17-page Errata Report which was distributed to the council as the item was being introduced at that meeting. Alone among his colleagues, Councilman Kelly Olsen said that he thought the development was too big (at 1.9 million square feet)