Santa Monica Ca Ordinances

The Santa Monica City Council approved a long-debated "living wage" ordinance early Wednesday that would raise the hourly minimum pay to $10.50 for workers at an estimated 40 large businesses in the city's popular beachfront and downtown districts. Backers rejoiced over what experts say is a national precedent involving such a municipally approved wage increase for private industry and said the move will help hundreds of workers support their families.

Santa Monica homeowners soon may be asked to take a big step for those who can't walk. In what would be the first such rules in the nation, Santa Monica officials are considering a proposal to require that all privately built new homes and those undergoing major remodeling have a wheelchair ramp entry, wide interior hallways and at least one handicapped-accessible bathroom.

Just weeks after Rent Control Board officials celebrated a U.S. Supreme Court move that bolstered their power, a Los Angeles Superior judge has mandated that the board relinquish some of its authority. Judge Hugh Gardner III ruled that the state's Costa-Hawkins Act, which allows landlords to raise controlled apartment rents to market rates after a tenant moves out voluntarily, supersedes the board's authority to dispute the validity of rent increases in such cases.

Santa Monica's landmark law regulating how businesses rehire workers laid off due to the post-Sept. 11 tourism slump is being praised by some as patriotic--and condemned by others as un-American. City Council members voted 4 to 3 Tuesday to require large firms operating in popular tourist and downtown areas to offer the jobs to former employees first before hiring new workers once the economy improves.

How do you spell relief for women waiting in a queue to use the loo? M-E-N. Under a public restroom law that won preliminary approval this week from the Santa Monica City Council, women will be entitled to use the men's room if the line at the ladies' room is more than three deep. If the situation is reversed--although it virtually never is--men can use the women's restroom. Otherwise, women are women and men are men in Santa Monica.

Fortunetellers in Santa Monica, banished for decades to the Santa Monica Pier, can soon set up shop along a portion of Ocean Front Walk, the tourist-heavy beachside path that historically has been off-limits to soothsayers. This week, the City Council unanimously passed an interim ordinance to allow fortunetellers to operate there from beachside storefronts, not from sidewalk tables.

After listening to views of more than 40 street performers and merchants, the City Council is scheduled to resume discussion next week on a controversial ordinance regulating street performers. "Street performers are the heart and soul of the [Third Street] Promenade," said Mayor Pam O'Connor. "They're what sets it apart from a shopping mall. They lure people here." The proposed ordinance calls for limits on performers' noise levels and on where they can set up.

Santa Monica teen-agers are about to be grounded. But only late at night and for their own good, said the five members of the Santa Monica City Council who have asked the city's lawyers to write up a curfew law. As it is envisioned, the curfew law would ban minors from hanging around on the streets after 10 p.m. on weeknights and after 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday nights. There are notable exceptions: Youths would be permitted out and about with their parents or other adult guardians.

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.

Eight years ago, the City of Santa Monica passed one of the strictest rent-control laws in the nation. In its wake came hundreds of complaints to a newly established rent control board accusing landlords of charging excessive rents. In one case, the board found that Haidy McHugh had overcharged two tenants living in her $400-a-month units and awarded them $4,390.99 in damages--triple the amount of the overcharge for what the board said was a willful violation of the law.

Santa Monica approved its controversial living wage law last month, but the fight over the measure continues. In fact, the fight is growing more heated with pro-business and pro-labor forces each accusing the other of unfair tactics. A business-backed group is collecting signatures to place a referendum on the ballot that would allow voters to decide whether the law will take effect next summer as planned.

Irvine may join a handful of California cities that have passed controversial campaign and ethics rules intended to prevent elected city officials from using their offices to enrich themselves. The proposed ordinance would restrict officials from accepting campaign donations, gifts or jobs from anyone with a major municipal contract or project that required a City Council vote.

Irvine may join a handful of California cities that have passed controversial campaign and ethics rules intended to prevent elected city officials from using their office to enrich themselves. The proposed ordinance would restrict elected officials from accepting campaign donations, gifts or jobs from anyone with a major municipal contract or project that required a City Council vote.

As the Santa Monica City Council on Tuesday gave final approval to its long-debated living wage ordinance, the landmark law triggered a tussle over voters' signatures. Opponents said they would begin collecting today the approximately 5,700 signatures needed for a public ballot referendum voiding the measure, which would set a minimum hourly pay of $10.50 at about 40 Santa Monica businesses.

The Santa Monica City Council tightened language in its controversial living wage ordinance Tuesday, clarifying that the law, which covers businesses in two tourism zones, also covers city workers and subcontractors. The council had been expected to give final approval to the ordinance setting a $10.50-per-hour minimum wage for businesses in the city's downtown and beach tourism zones.

Opponents of $10.50 minimum hourly pay at Santa Monica's bigger beach-area businesses said Monday that they will seek a public referendum in May to overturn that so-called living wage ordinance. That controversial wage hike was approved 5 to 1 last month by the City Council, which is expected to vote for final passage tonight.

Santa Monica this week ended its City Hall-lawn meal program for the homeless and began enforcing a new ordinance outlawing living in public places. The two events mark a major turning point in the way this city manages its homeless problem. On Monday, the meals program quietly moved to three indoor sites where homeless people can also obtain other services.

Baseball has its seventh-inning stretch. Buckingham Palace has its changing of the guard. And now, Santa Monica has its street performer shuffle. An emergency ordinance passed by the seaside city this week requires sidewalk entertainers and vendors to stand 40 feet apart, and to pack up and move 120 feet every two hours while working the Third Street Promenade or Santa Monica Pier, the city's most famous tourist attractions.

At 18, Vivian Rothstein got her first taste of a protest for social change. She was a UC Berkeley student and one of 500 people on trial in a 1964 mass protest against race-based employment discrimination at San Francisco car dealerships. Her court-appointed lawyer was an African American who as a soldier helped liberate Berlin, the city her Jewish parents had fled in 1933. His defense, Rothstein says, drew a parallel between discriminatory laws in Nazi Germany and those in this country.

While attorneys speculated on the constitutionality of Santa Monica's newly approved living wage law, hotel housekeeper Blanca Mendez was just hoping Thursday that she can benefit if a raise to $10.50 an hour goes into effect next summer at large downtown and beach-side businesses. "It would be fantastic," said Mendez, who now earns $8.50 an hour after seven years at the Streamline Moderne-style Shangri-La Hotel near the ocean.