Hometown Hero: Barbara Stinchfield

Barbara Stinchfield
Photo by Annie Stinchfield

SUSAN CLOKE

Mirror Columnist

December 30, 2011

“I came to Santa Monica at a time of high activism in the City.  There were many ideas being discussed and many people interested in the things I was interested in: child- care advocacy, youth services and working with non-profits.  It seemed a good fit,” said Barbara Stinchfield, who will retire at the end of December from her long-term position as Director of Community and Cultural Services for the City of Santa Monica. 

Looking back on her work Stinchfield said, “I was living in Oregon and right out of graduate school, with a master’s degree in counseling, I worked on youth advocacy programs.  I worked on the founding of a shelter for runaway teenagers and the development of public alternative schools.

“When I came to Los Angeles I realized there wasn’t really a similar niche so I decided to get my MBA and that led to the job with Santa Monica.  Now that I’m retiring people keep talking about my legacy and it’s hard for me to get perspective on that idea.  What I am most proud of is that we have a strong department team and I know that when I leave there will be a smooth transition.”

She began in the Community and Neighborhood Services Division and was quickly promoted to be the manager.  It was a small division, funded by federal grants.

Soon after, the Council made a policy decision to fund non-profits doing work that furthered policy goals of promoting affordable housing construction, park improvements and the growing neighborhood associations in the City.   Monies from the General Fund were added to the federal grant monies.

“We helped OPCC (Ocean Park Community Center) fund a shelter for runaway youth and the Clare Foundation to fund a house for shelter and programs,” said Stinchfield.  “We also added a focus on human service planning activities and stewarded the writing of the Child Care Master Plan and the Youth Action Plan, working in coordination with the community.

“What started as a small division with a budget of about $600,000 grew to what it is today,  $7 million coming from grants and general funds.”

In the early 1990’s she was given the job as assistant director of Community and Cultural Services, a new department, the old division was disbanded and neighborhood services became the human services division of the new department.

Under Stinchfield’s leadership the Department developed the Open Space Element of the General Plan and the long range Parks and Recreation Master Plan. 

In the late 1990’s the then City Manager, John Jalili, appointed Stinchfield as Community and Cultural Services Director.  Sinchfield said, “my mission was to build a cohesive team with the common goal of serving Santa Monica.”

It was a time of a major building boom in capital projects.  It’s an impressive list: the Swim Center at Santa Monica College: the renovation of Douglas Park; the new children’s playground at Reed Park; the building of Airport Park and Euclid Park; the expansion of Virginia Avenue Park with a focus on a comprehensive center for the neighborhood and especially neighborhood youth; building the new promenade, bike path, parks and restrooms at the beach; the renovation of the northern part of Palisades Park; and the restoration of Miles Playhouse.

“It hasn’t always been a bed of roses,” said Stinchfield.  “For instance we thought people would be delighted to have a new park on Euclid.  But they weren’t.   We put up a tent in the parking lot to have a meeting with the neighbors, we listened to them and added community gardens and made it primarily for children.  People felt heard.

“I’m known for my frankness.  It’s gotten me into some interesting dilemmas.  People appreciate it but they sometimes wonder how I can be so frank.  It’s just an Oregonian trait.  Its something I’m known for with a chuckle.  It surprised some people, but ultimately people knew where I stood and that I would not go back on my word.

“The biggest example is the Beach House.  It’s well known that neighbors were concerned and there were many, many meetings and much hammering out of parameters.  Out of that came the settlement agreement we now live with and the neighbors are happy.

“In Santa Monica, we believe in major community participation.  My daughter, Annie, came to community meetings with me and was often the first to raise her hand.  Imagine my surprise when she told me she wanted to have a meeting at her nursery school about creating a quiet place.  But we had that meeting and today there is the Ellen Stinchfield quiet room at the Growing Place, named in honor of Annie’s grandmother.

“One indication of how I work is that I just have easy chairs and a coffee table in my office.  I did that on purpose.  I want people to feel free to come in and plop down and work things out together.  I want to listen, understand and find solutions.

 “People like to work with authentic, honest and fair people and that’s what I’ve I tried to be.  You can have technical skills, but if you don’t speak the truth when the truth needs to be spoken you’re not leaving a legacy.”

What Say You: Ocean Park Green Street Celebration

OPA Board Members at the Groundbreaking Ceremony

SUSAN CLOKE

Mirror Columnist

This past wonderfully rainy December Monday, 50 people, members of the Ocean Park community and members of City Staff, came together at the Ocean Park Library to celebrate the groundbreaking of the Ocean Park Boulevard Green Street Project.

Ocean Park Boulevard has been redesigned from Lincoln Boulevard to Neilson Way with a new, sustainable and native landscape, over one hundred new trees, wider sidewalks, new parkways, new medians, bio-swales and infiltration areas to capture, infiltrate and clean storm water, new crosswalks, bike lanes, bike racks, and new, low scale, light poles.

The initial idea for this project came from the Ocean Park community.  Neighbors remember the first meetings, almost twenty years ago, in Bob Taylor’s living room, meetings at Jane Spillar’s, meetings at Peet’s, and at OPA (Ocean Park Association). 

Bob Taylor reminded everyone that Ocean Park Boulevard had been redeveloped to accommodate the traffic that the City thought would come with planned growth at the beach when Pacific Ocean Park was built.  But widening the street divided the neighborhood and left people without a safe place to cross.  Bob said, “We have the opportunity to add modern bells and whistles to our original concept which was designed to bring the neighborhood back together.”

“It’s a gateway for Ocean Park, it puts the park back into Ocean Park Boulevard,” said Peter James, the senior planner with the City.  “This project is not solely about making Ocean Park Boulevard a better place to bike and walk and improving water quality in the Bay.  Yes, it is about sustainability and that’s important to us, but it’s fundamentally about people and their changing attitude about the role of streets in the community.

John Kaliski, the project architect, believes the project is more than the design of a street, he sees it as creating greater community.  “One of the joys of working on the Ocean Park Boulevard project is that the community wanted more before we got involved, demanded the best from us, and dogged all at the City to make sure that our collective vision is implemented. I am very hopeful that the outcome will live up to all of our expectations to bring the community physically together on foot and on bicycles, create a new sense of neighborhood identity, realize heightened sustainability with regard to storm water mitigation, and craft a street and sidewalk that is integral to people's sense of home.”

The timing is finally right, money is available for storm water capture and treatment and for supporting bicycling as transportation.  The City has made a formal commitment to sustainability.  The health of the Bay is understood to be essential to the economic health of the City.  Most importantly, protecting the health of the Bay and being a sustainable City are demands made by Santa Monicans of their government.

Santa Monica Mayor Richard Bloom summed up the sentiment of the day saying, “This project weaves together the threads of sustainability and brings together the two sides of the neighborhood that have been split for so long.”

Santa Monica City Civil Engineer Carlos Rosales estimates that construction on the Ocean Park Boulevard Complete Green Street project will begin this week.  He said, “Construction will last just over a year, and one lane of traffic will be kept moving in both directions at all times.”

As an Ocean Park resident, I’m hugely optimistic about this project at the same time I also realize it is only a piece of one street.  Success will really be measured by its use as a model.  For the health of the Bay we have to infiltrate storm water citywide and keep polluted, pathogen and chemical carrying storm water out of the Bay.  If biking is to become a reasonable mode of transportation to offset our carbon footprint we have to be able to travel throughout the city safely and comfortably.  Every tree planted improves air quality and provides shade and beauty. Planting 100 trees is fantastic, but we need a citywide tree canopy to significantly improve air quality.

For connecting neighborhoods, for making a reality of our commitment to sustainability, we need to think about our streets differently and to put the park back, not only into Ocean Park Boulevard, but into all our streets.

What Say You?

 

The Ocean Park Boulevard “Complete Green Street” project  www.SMConstructs.org/OPB.

Construction manager Arcadis U.S., Inc.  310.857.4946.

Previous column March 2009  “What Say You:  Green Streets.”   

 

Santa Monica Hometown Hero: Paul Rosenstein

Paul Rosenstein

SUSAN CLOKE

Columnist, Santa Monica Mirror

“I always think of Santa Monica as a livable and sustainable community with a slow and thoughtful approach to growth, maintaining its small scale, minimizing auto traffic, and supporting biking and walking,” said Paul Rosenstein, two-time City Council member, former Mayor, former member of the Planning Commission and of the Pier Board and one of the founders of Mid-City Neighbors.

Paul moved to Santa Monica in 1982. His day job was as an electrician. He was a member of the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers). In 2000, when Paul finished his second Council term, he took on the more than full-time job of Political Director for the IBEW, moved on to be a national representative for the AFL-CIO and then on to work with the Coalition of Unions at Kaiser Permanente, where his job focused on improving the quality of health care. 

It was a series of demanding stints and when he retired in August 2009 he was able to turn his attention to his own neighborhood and to the City. He began going to the community meetings on the LUCE (Land Use and Circulation Element) to learn what was being planned for the future of Santa Monica.

“Overall, I was impressed with the ideas and the goals of the LUCE. At the same time the scale and the amount of development in the industrial area concerned me,” said Paul.   “I saw the City as hustling people and people in the neighborhoods as not knowing what was coming down. By that I mean that the City is in transition, many projects are being proposed, and notification is neighborhood-by-neighborhood, project-by-project, but only to those who live within a 500-foot radius of the proposed project. So lots of people who will live with project impacts are not notified. There is no requirement for citywide notification even though the cumulative effect of the many projects currently being considered will be citywide.

“I saw this as a problem when I was on the Council,” Paul said. “At that time, I had proposed that the larger the project the wider the notification area should be. But the idea to expand the notification rules was not adopted and it continues to be an issue.”

“When I began to figure out the scope of what was coming, I got up at the LUCE meeting at Virginia Avenue Park and asked why we were encouraging more commercial development as there are already several thousands of people working in the City who get caught, daily, in backed up traffic on the 10 (Freeway),” he said. “I asked if it wouldn’t make more sense to build housing so people who worked here could live here.

“By the way, to make it sexy, commercial development in the industrial district was renamed as creative arts office space. It sounds idyllic and sounds like a lot of small businesses, supported by neighborhood uses such as cafes and coffee shops, really it is a lot of commercial development that will bring an excessive amount of traffic into Santa Monica.”

Paul said the LUCE goal of no net new traffic was good.  “I feel very strange raising all these traffic issues because that is the issue for the anti-growth people and I’m not anti-growth, but I am for being reasonable,” he said. “I also want us to look carefully at the Civic Auditorium development. There’s an advantage to remembering past promises. The parking structure on Fourth St. was built to replace the parking slated to be lost when the civic center lot was planned to become Civic Auditorium Park. But that park has dropped off the planning table. And the company that has the contract to develop the Civic has insisted on a minimum of 100 spaces adjacent to the auditorium. What happened here?”

Paul has lived in Santa Monica for 29 years. His parents lived here and were active members of the community. He is married to Ada Hollie, an educator and a member of the Santa Monica City College Emeritus College Executive Council.

Paul was at the first meeting of Mid-City neighbors and spent 14 years getting to know the City through his neighborhood activism and his public service. What he calls, “learning the ropes.” “Through these experiences I learned how to build consensus,” he said. “It can be difficult to make decisions where there are competing issues, and there is usually more than one side to any issue, but the community must be able to have a say in the protection of the city. I support the goals of the LUCE but want to help make sure we don’t kill the golden goose.”

Now, Paul, once again, is offering to serve on the City Planning Commission. He has submitted his application to the Council for their consideration and, he hopes, approval.  His willingness to serve and his understanding of the community will make his voice an important addition to the Commission. Paul speaks for many Santa Monicans when he says, “Santa Monica is an urban village, having the benefits of a village and the amenities of an urban environment and that’s what I want to protect and promote.”