Hometown Hero: Janet Salomonson M.D.

Janet Salomonson M.D. FACS

Santa Monica plastic surgeon Janet Salomonson will be in Guatemala this coming summer performing operations to correct the birth anomaly of cleft palate.  “We never turn away any child who is healthy enough to go through the operation.   I stay for one or sometimes two weeks in the host country and typically perform about five operations every day.  We work until the work is done,” said Dr. Salomonson.

“For reasons we still don’t know, even though the human genome has been mapped, normal structures don’t form in the lip and palate and children are born with cleft palate.  Not only is cleft palate disfiguring, it’s important to have the structures in place as early as possible so the child can learn to speak correctly.  It’s best to do the operations in stages.  We do the lip first, especially with a child under 10 months and then return to repair the palate.

“If the cleft palate is not corrected when they are very young the child can still learn to speak, but often they can’t speak clearly and can have difficulty being understood.”

Salomonson has been to Nicaragua, Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and the Philippines to perform cleft palate surgeries. This is her tenth year of working with Faces of Hope and Rotaplast, two Rotary sponsored groups, which arrange trips for teams of medical professionals to work internationally donating their much-needed medical skills.

“We go with a spirit of humility and with respect for the local culture.  We work with the local people.  Their knowledge is helpful to the success of our work.  We partner, whenever possible, with local physicians and are always on the look out for local physicians who want to be trained in cleft palate surgery.

“We bring the supplies, everything from sutures to anesthesia,
our own scrubs, antibiotics, so that we are not taking from the local facility.” Doctor Salomonson noted.

The visits of the medical teams are announced on the radio, in the newspapers and on banners and flyers.  The radio seems to be the way most people learn about the program.

The organizing group goes ahead of the medical team and scouts out the situation in the host country to make sure that the basic requirements for operating and achieving good surgical outcomes can be met. They also make the arrangements for lodging and meals for the medical team members.

The daughter of Swedish immigrants to Minnesota she has the famous Midwestern straightforward manner and self –deprecating style.  Her mom was a stay at home mom and her dad worked on road construction. They wanted the American dream of education and a better life for their child.

Her parents had originally met when her mom was a ‘summer child’ on a farm.  It is a typical Swedish custom, kind of the Swedish equivalent of sending your kid to camp, for city children to go to farms in the summer.   On the farm she was given a kitten, the food was great and she had a wonderful time.  She liked the entire farm family, including the older son.  Years later, they met again and decided to marry.

Salomonson’s path to studying medicine was incremental.  She knew when she was in Maplewood High School in St. Paul, Minnesota that she was drawn to math and science.

This took her to the University Of Minnesota as an undergraduate to study Chemical Engineering.  Many of her professors worked in the field of bioengineering and medicine.  Salomonson admired their work and decided she would apply to medical school and become a medical researcher.

In Medical School, also at the University of Minnesota, she fell in love with the clinical work and decided that, as much as the research meant to her, it would mean more to work with patients.   One more incremental move took her to UCLA for a surgical residency, starting in general surgery and then specializing in plastic surgery.

Now she has the hard earned and well deserved prestigious title, Janet Salomonson, MD, FACS, Plastic Surgeon/Medical Director of the Cleft Palate Center at Saint John's Cleft Center.
At the invitation of a beloved former teacher, Salomonson went back to Minnesota to give the commencement address at her old high school.   She told the graduates, “You won’t remember for long who won the super bowl or even the Nobel Prize, but you will remember the teachers who taught you about the world and the people who were important to you.  Fame is not what is important.  What is important are the people in our lives.”

What Say You: Bergamot Transit Village and Hines

How did it all go so wrong is the question being asked about the development proposed by Hines 26th Street, LLC (Hines) for a 960, 000 square feet project located on the north side of Olympic Boulevard from Stewart Street on the east to 26^th Street on the west to Pennsylvania Avenue on the north.

The Land Use and Circulation Element (LUCE) criteria for the site of the proposed project call for “a village environment as the focus of community life” with an “exciting neighborhood that is unique and authentic” and with a “bold and eclectic building design that reflects an arts character.

“One with human scaled buildings, a variety of housing types, creative arts jobs, local serving retail/services, reestablishing the city roads pattern to provide pedestrian, bicycle and vehicular connections throughout the project area and into the surrounding neighborhoods.”

The Hines proposal busts the scale and character of the City’s vision, instead proposing super-sized buildings that are suburban rather than urban, corporate rather than ‘bold, eclectic and reflecting an arts character’, and isolated rather than connected to adjacent neighborhoods and the City.

The area name, ‘Bergamot Transit Village’ comes from the LUCE, but the Hines proposal has no relationship to the name.  ‘Bergamot’ echoes a time when the bergamot plant, a California native, grew on the site.  Yet there is no design nod to the history of the site. ‘Transit’ identifies the site in its relationship to the coming Expo Station.  Yet it does not connect with ease or enticement to the coming Expo Station and the Bergamot Arts Center. Finally, the proposal is antithetical to the qualities of a ‘village’ - a place, traditionally built over time, where people come together to live, have fun, conduct business and to express the values and hopes of the common community. 

On March 22, 2011, after a lengthy public hearing and a full discussion by the six Council Members present, a unanimous Council sent the developer back to the drawing board with Council Member Bobby Shriver leading the argument that approving entering into a contract for a Development Agreement would send the wrong message to the developer. This project he said, “doesn’t feel like Santa Monica.” 

Council Member Kevin McKeown reflected broad public sentiment when he stated, “the City is baffled by the proposal and wonders why we are entertaining it at this time.”  On McKeown’s motion the Council voted not to enter into negotiations on the terms of the Development Agreement and, instead, to direct staff to work with the developer to address all the points made by Council and in the Staff Report.   The Council would then reconsider the application and decide at that point whether to enter into negotiations on a Development Agreement for the project.

Development Agreements, contracts entered into between cities and developers, allow for the agreement to contain terms and conditions that are specifically negotiated and determined for the project.  The fee for the Development Agreement application is unique in Santa Monica in that the developer pays the City an initial fee of $10,000.00 and staff time is then billed to the developer, at a rate of $227.00 per hour (a rate determined for the City by an independent study).  If the initial fee is exhausted, the developer continues to pay the City for staff time at the predetermined rate, thus allowing the City to recover costs.

The real question remains.  How did the developer, who knew that his project would have to meet the LUCE standards, get it so wrong?  Why doesn’t his design meet the LUCE standards?  Where are the “bold and eclectic buildings that reflect an arts character and express the unique and authentic qualities of the Bergamot area?”  

However, repeated calls to Colin Shepherd, the representative for Hines, were not returned.  As of press time we don’t know how the company would answer.

What could Hines do to get to go on this project?  Listening to the Council Members at the March 22 meeting, Hines would have to commit to a fundamental redesign of the entire project. 

Start with a new master plan for the site that re-established the street grid and then expanded on that grid to create a network of public sidewalks, pathways, gardens and public destination points is the starting place.  Done right, this would be the beginning of creating character and a sense of place and would establish clear connections between the project site, the coming Expo Station, Bergamot Arts Center, the surrounding neighborhoods and the City as a whole. 

Redesign the proposed mega buildings into a series of appropriately scaled buildings that relate to the street.  Crucial to the redesign would be a respect for the aesthetic vision for Bergamot. A vision established through years of public workshops and finalized through the formal public approval process of the LUCE. 

Creating a ‘village’ is probably the hardest of the tasks. Key to success in achieving the village concept will be the design of the individual buildings, their place in the landscape, and their relationship to the street grid. Essential to the design is that the buildings express the aesthetic character called for in the LUCE and that each building be distinct.  Fortunately, for Hines and for the City, Santa Monica is home to great architects of both international and local renown.  It would go a long way toward achieving the village concept if each building in the redesigned project were to be designed by individual architects all working toward the common goals of the LUCE.

As it stands now, all I have for Hines are questions. 

What Say You?