Another Former City Worker Accuses Santa Monica of Wrongful Termination
Someone Named in the Suit for Alleged Wrongdoing … Filed Their Own Suit Against the City in February
By Zach Armstrong
Within a span of six months, two former municipal workers filed lawsuits against the City of Santa Monica with concerns related to unlawful termination and wrongful practices.
Plaintiff Araceli Esparza, who brought the most recent suit forward in the Los Angeles Superior Court on July 30, is seeking unspecified damages over the alleged wrongdoing. Representatives from the City and the City’s Attorney’s Office did not immediately provide a response to inquiry.
Hired in May of 2012, Esparza held several positions for the City including Purchasing Services Manage and Procurement Manager, in addition to acting as an Equity Inclusion Officer and organizer for Hispanic Heritage Month activities, as stated in the suit.
After addressing City Council in 2020
about a dispropriate number of minority City workers being laid off compared with caucasian ones, the lawsuit alleges, Esparza faced a series of retaliations such as being excluded from meetings that her colleagues could attend, kept out of committees relevant to her job and received an email copied with several peers that falsely accused her of lying about the number of minority layoffs. Esparza alleges to have been the victim of further unfair reprisal upon addressing how City funds were spent.
In September of that year, the lawsuit states that Esparza met with the Interim City Attorney and the Deputy City Attorney to report contracts exceeding $250,000 with nonprofits not first approved by City Council; thus in violation of a municipal code. Earlier that year, she reported a City employee who was using a fake invoice for payments despite the City withholding funds from the individual for wage violation, and that the employee’s actions were approved by her direct supervisor.
The following year, Esparza reported a potentially illegal procurement procedure for a multi-million dollar contract, further addressing concerns that her supervisors didn’t disclose conflicts of interest with the awarded entities.
After being placed on administrative leave pending an investigation over “inserting herself” into a co-workers
reimbursement request, the lawsuit states an email was sent to the entire finance department falsely saying Esparza took a “leave of absence.” According to the suit, this showed evidence of the City’s “retaliation and disparate treatment of [Esparza].”
The suit states that Esparza was terminated from her position in May of 2023, the same month that negative investigative findings against her were sustained.
As a consequence of the aforementioned events, the suit states Esparza has suffered economic, physical and mental damage; such as that of her professional reputation and ability to be selected for another position, in addition to losing pension and other benefits. An excess of $25,000 has been accrued due to medical expenses for anxiety, anguish and overall mental suffering, the lawsuit states.
The suit accuses several City officials of participating, approving or condoning the alleged retaliatory conduct against Esparza, including City Manager David White, Assistant City Manager Susan Cline, Deputy City Manager Anuj Gupta, Chief of Staff Christopher Smith, among others.
One person the suit names as involved in wrongful behavior is Lori Gentles, the former Human Resources Director, who brought forward similar accusations against the City about six months ago
in the Superior Court of California, County of L.A., also alleging that those actions caused damage to her mental well-being.
According to that suit, Gentles made complaints during her tenure about “institutionalized racism” with the City, specifically towards her and other employees who resigned due to “disparate treatment received based on their race.”
It also alleges that the former HR chief attempted to implement changes which would’ve eliminated discrimination, but was retaliated against for doing so, while also being “held to a different standard” than her White counterparts within City leadership. Another detailed instance occurred in April 2021, when Gentles received a complaint of a White City worker allegedly saying “we could just lynch him” in reference to a Black man. When Gentles reported the matter, she was allegedly laughed at by the man who was subsequently appointed to run the case’s investigation.
After Delays, Grand Opening Set for Santa Monica’s New Barnes & Noble
Initial Reports Indicated That an Opening for the New Westside Bookshop Was Set for June or Early July
By Zach Armstrong
Bookworms of L.A.’s Westside have been waiting for the return of the
nation’s largest retail bookseller to Third Street Promenade ever since an imminent opening was announced last year.
For a little over two decades, a twostory Barnes & Noble outpost sat on the northeast corner of the Promenade next to Wilshire until its closing in January 2018. Now, the franchise is soon set to open at the long-vacant space at 1318 3rd Street (adjacent to the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf spot and the former site of Athleta women’s sportswear).
Initial reports indicated that an opening for the new Westside bookshop was set for June or early July of this year. However, August has arrived and the storefront remains sealed in signage that states “Barnes & Noble Coming
Soon” written twice across.
Upon calling the upcoming store’s provided phone number, a voicemail message stated that the location has set its grand opening date for August 28. Concurrently, after googling “Barnes & Noble Santa Monica Opening” at the time of this writing, “Opens Aug 21” is seen in yellow lettering on the right side results. The franchise’s website also confirms that an August 2024 opening is in place.
Andrew Thomas, Chief Executive Officer of Downtown Santa Monica Inc., responded to inquiry from Mirror Media Group, saying in an email that the organization didn’t have an exact date for BN’s new opening, but that “they are close.”
Reasons for the outpost’s launch delays aren’t immediately clear. The new Promenade storefront will be the second time in the last year Barnes & Noble has opened a new West L.A. location nearby a prior spot. In Marina del Rey, the retail franchise opened at 4752 Admiralty Way in October just minutes away from its former MDR spot.
Award-Winning Soprano Golda Zahra to debut role of Liu in concert GALA performance of Turandot at Walt Disney Hall celebrating 100 years of Puccini
Los Angeles, California, July 23, 2024. LA Music Center’s Spotlight Award winner Golda Zahra to perform in concert gala production of Puccini’s Turandot with Dream Orchestra led by renowned conductor Maestro Daniel Suk. This outstanding production will feature 200 performers, top soloists, Opera Choir of Los Angeles, and Han Opera Conservatory of Music traveling from China for this EPIC performance!
When: Friday, August 16 at 7:30pm
Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, LA Music Center, 111 S Grand Ave, Los Angeles
Tickets: DreamOrchestra.org or MusicCenter.org
For media inquiries, contact Shallom Berkman at 310-749-8879, or email sberkman@urthcaffe.com
Golda Zahra will debut the role of Liu in Turandot at Walt Disney Hall coming
after her most recent spectacular soldout concert at the BroadStage in Santa Monica. This concert GALA production of Turandot will have over 200 performers, including the Opera Choir of Los Angeles, Singing the title role Turandot is Chelsea Lehnea, soprano, Arnold Livingston Geis as Calaf, Zihan Xiu and Golda Zahra making their debut as Liu, joined by all professional Opera Chorus of Los Angeles and Han China Conservatory of Music accompanied by the Los Angeles Dream Orchestra lead by Maestro Daniel Suk. A delegation of singers from the Han China Conservatory of Music lead by Chinese opera star, soprano, Yanwen Han are traveling all the way from China to perform in this EPIC concert gala! Daniel Suk, music director of Dream Orchestra and the producer of the Turandot Concert Gala, has enjoyed an international career across Italy and the US that spans more
than 25 years. Turandot is Puccini’s final and most world-renowned opera that takes place in China, made famous by the aria “Nessun Dorma” performed by the legendary tenor Luciano Pavarotti, as well as many great tenors past and present.
Golda Zahra has been hailed as “A promising young opera singer” by the L.A. Times, a “Rising Star of the opera world” by the Hollywood Times, and a rising star of her generation. She has performed as a soloist with orchestras including The Southwest Symphony, Hollywood Chamber Orchestra, and LA Opera under the baton of James Conlon. She is the recipient of the prestigious Los Angeles Music Center’s Spotlight Award. More information can be found on Golda Zahra on her website: https://www. goldazahra.com
The Laurel Opens in Santa Monica, Providing Housing for the Formerly Homeless
Designed by KFAArchitecture, the Laurel Features Wood-Frame
Construction and Rises Four Stories
The city of Santa Monica has welcomed residents to The Laurel, a city-funded Permanent Supportive Housing development that offers 57 apartments to individuals who were formerly experiencing homelessness.
Many of the new occupants at The Laurel had been living outdoors in Santa Monica for years, known to and connected with the housed community members, as stated in a City blog post. Others were on the verge of homelessness before securing their new apartments.
“Without The Laurel, these 57 individuals would still be living on our streets or in short-term shelters not suitable for long-term residency,” a city official stated.
The Laurel, located just south of the
10 Freeway in Santa Monica’s Pico neighborhood, is a project developed by EAH Housing. The complex, at 1413 Michigan Avenue, stands on the former site of Santa Monica Nikkei Hall.
The project includes a total of 58 residential units, with 57 apartments reserved for low-income formerly homeless renters and one manager’s unit. These studio apartments are set aside for rent at levels considered affordable to households earning between 30 and 50 percent of the Santa Monica area median income, as per a deal arranged by the city in 2020, Urbanize LA reported in April.
Designed by KFA Architecture, The Laurel features wood-frame construction and rises four stories. The building’s C-shaped footprint allows for a ground-level courtyard, complemented by a second-floor patio, a third-floor community deck, and 12 parking spaces at street level.
Urbanize LA reported that EAH Housing preserved several elements of the former Nikkei Hall, including the community center, original windows, entry porch, and woodwork. Additionally, the property’s Japanese garden is being restored.
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Trust our commitment to quality and community, celebrate milestones that define our journey; at Harvest of Santa Monica, blending integrity with innovation, offering products reflecting dedication to excellence and well-being, each interaction and deal a brushstroke on the canvas of our thriving community— embrace our shared adventure, face the future with confidence, and remember: We’ve got this! Believe in our community's power to craft a story of success, growth, and togetherness.
Sharks vs. Batteries - Part 5 of 5
SMa.r.t.
Santa Monica Architects for a Responsible Tomorrow
This is the last SMart article in an expanding 5 part series about our City’s power, water, and food prospects. These three factors are essential to the City’s prosperity and, more importantly, to its sustainability and survivability. Last week’s article covered the importance of building power storage capacity (https://smmirror.com/2024/08/sm-ar-t-column-your-homes-first-batteryis-in-your-car/) because our best, cheapest energy sources, (wind and solar photovoltaic) fluctuate massively in day night and seasonal cycles. Specifically, car batteries could absorb some of that surplus fluctuating power generated by those sources (and when not needed for the car’s mobility) could feed it back into your home or business. Because electric cars have relatively large batteries and are increasing in number, they will be the City’s first widely distributed, industrialscale power storage facility.
Abundant Green Power
As we increasingly meet all of California’s power needs for longer periods of time from fluctuating solar and wind sources, there will be more and more times when we have clean “surplus”
power. We could “dump” that extra power into the grid of adjacent states, but we would suffer substantial transmission losses, not to mention pricing issues. It would be better to store it in local batteries of various forms for immediate nighttime use and seismic survivability or even use it to make hydrogen. Hydrogen is made by electrically “stripping” hydrogen molecules off, for example, water. The advantage is if the electricity used to make it comes from clean, renewable sources, that hydrogen fuel, while expensive, is clean burning (no greenhouse gases or combustion particle pollution) and the only byproduct of burning hydrogen is essentially water vapor. But, the real advantage of hydrogen is that it has the power density closer to gasoline or to carcinogenic diesel fuel. This power density means it will become the main clean power source for the heavy load industry: trains, trucks, ships, etc., e.g., uses that will never have enough power capacity if they have to carry around heavy conventional batteries. Think of hydrogen fuel as a “battery” in another form. While the hydrogen power infrastructure is still in its infancy, at a primitive level even weaker than the sporadic power recharging available to electric cars today, it will eventually dominate the heavy load market.
Another advantage of local battery storage is as SCE transitions to timeof-use pricing, battery-equipped homes, and businesses can partially or fully
shift, by using batteries, their peak use time to the hours when power is cheaper. We already have available pricy Tesla batteries and their cousins for immediate local storage, providing that advantage and improving survivability to both brownouts and seismic events. Just like solar panels and windmills, whose prices have fallen dramatically in the last decade, battery technology will follow the same falling price arc as its demand ramps up. Naturally, a hospital, police station, school, or business with balanced solar photovoltaic collectors and storage capacity can keep operating during our inevitable brownouts. As previously discussed, there are still some needed switching technology improvements for this transition to happen seamlessly, but those are on their way too.
Power Independence
diffuse distribution power/storage solution also appeals to the American spirit of independence. Freedom from the grid, while still benefitting from it as a standby, is a positive value not just for survivalists but also for everyday citizens who understand how fragile our food, water, and energy grid has become.
But for a full transition to clean, 100% renewable energy, we need industrial scaled urban capacity batteries. Batteries are rapidly improving beyond the rare earth minerals that commonly power, for example, your I phone. Batteries are being tested made from a wide variety of exotic and ordinary materials. (e.g., sand, compressed air, etc.). They can even be made by altering the use of existing power facilities. For example, during times of extra solar/wind power we can pump the water back up behind hydroelectric dams to reuse their increased hydro flow at night. In a relatively short amount of time, appropriate lower-cost material, arrangement, and pricing of power storage capacity on an urban scale will emerge. While massive future warehouses of batteries, similar to the huge server farms powering the crypto phenomenon, may eventually emerge as the most effective storage solution, a redundant diffuse capacity is probably the best for redundant survivability. This is similar to having thousands of distributed rooftop solar collectors converting sunlight to power for thousands of homes and businesses rather than having a few concentrated and possibly vulnerable power plants (e.g., Ukraine’s vulnerable grid). A
So in the high stakes three-way race of increasing power demand vs increasing clean power supply and increased power storage capacity, any building we build, should in some way always be helping to solve these real issues. Even electric cars which inevitably increase power demand, may also provide some mitigation by providing some accessible power storage. Modern homes and buildings up to three stories can provide and improve all three but are not yet required to store some of the power they can generate. A typical apartment building, while increasing demand, also can mitigate it by increased rooftop power supply and often has room for future storage batteries. Codes for these types of buildings should already be emphasizing power production and storage, since it is going to be inevitably needed sooner than we think.
Unfortunately, skyscrapers, which are starting to flood our City, massively increase power demand but have virtually no supply capability on their minuscule rooftops (without some future unknown breakthrough technologies) and fatally are not required to provide any storage capacity at all. For this reason, once built, they will become a permanent burden on our ecological future: they are an ecological mortgage that can never be paid off. They crush and devalue not only all the adjacent properties but also the beach side spirit of our City; Sacramento-incited developers are like sharks in a skyscraper-feeding frenzy that is permanently transforming our City for the worst and will continue to
degrade its survivability for decades.
At a June rally in Nevada, Republican presidential candidate Trump raised a scary scenario of being caught in a sinking electrically powered boat encircled by a hungry shark. He faced the hypothetical choice of being either electrocuted by the boat’s wet battery or eaten by the shark. So perhaps we can use battery requirements to slow down the skyscraper sharks devouring our City.
The least the City should do is require massive battery storage capacity in skyscrapers. In the subterranean floors of those skyscrapers that would have been filled with parking (before Sacramento eliminated all parking requirements), we could have beneficial batteries. The City already forces new homes to provide all their power from rooftop solar collectors at the owner’s expense, but also as a real public benefit. Likewise, skyscrapers
who are useless at power production should provide substantial storage capacity at the owner’s cost but also as a public benefit. So that even if they’re seemingly inevitable, they can at least be in the smallest way, not totally negative.
By Mario Fonda-Bonardi AIA
S.M.a.r.t Santa Monica Architects for a Responsible Tomorrow
Thane Roberts, Architect, Mario Fonda-Bonardi AIA, Robert H. Taylor AIA, Architect, Dan Jansenson, Architect & Building and Fire-Life Safety Commission, Samuel Tolkin Architect & Planning Commissioner, Michael Jolly, AIR-CRE Marie Standing. Jack Hillbrand AIA
For previous articles, see www. santamonicaarch.wordpress.com/writing
Americana in the Park & Endless Summer
C.A.M.P.
Coming to Santa Monica Parks
Both event series are supported by the city’s Art of Recovery community grants initiative
Two event series, Endless Summer C.A.M.P. (Community, Art, Music, Picnic) and Americana in the Park, are bringing music and family-friendly activities to Santa Monica parks in August and September.
The second annual Endless Summer C.A.M.P. will feature world music, dance, puppetry, and animals from around the world for four Saturdays in August at Tongva Park, located at 1615 Ocean Ave. The family-friendly event, in partnership with Community Arts Resources (CARS), encourages attendees to pack a picnic, blankets, and beach chairs. Tongva Park offers amenities including a splash pad, playground, ocean observation deck,
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public art, and over 100 species of plants.
along, high-energy instrumentals, craft activities, and food trucks.
is/are: Anderson Moggs, Inc .1109 Marine St. Santa Monica, Ca. 90405 . This business is conducted by A Corporation. The registrant commenced to transact business under the fictitious business name or names listed above on 07/2024. declare that all information in this statement is true and correct. (A registrant who declares as true information which he or she knows to be false is guilty of a crime). Signed Peer Heerlein. This Statement was filed with the County Clerk of Los Angeles County on July 31, 2024. NOTICE: IN ACCORDANCE WITH SUBDIVISION (a) OF SECTION 17920, A FICTITIOUS NAME STATEMENT GENERALLY EXPIRES AT THE END OF FIVE YEARS FROM THE DATE ON WHICH IT WAS FILED IN THE OFFICE OF THE COUNTY CLERK, EXCEPT, AS PROVIDED IN SUBDIVISION (b) OF SECTION 17920, WHERE IT EXPIRES 40 DAYS AFTER ANY CHANGE IN THE FACTS SET FORTH IN THE STATEMENT PURSUANT TO SECTION 17913 OTHER THAN A CHANGE IN THE RESIDENCE ADDRESS OF A REGISTERED OWNER. A NEW FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT MUST BE FILED BEFORE THE EXPIRATION. THE FILING OF THIS STATEMENT DOES NOT OF ITSELF AUTHORIZE THE USE IN THIS STATE OF A FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME IN VIOLATION OF THE RIGHTS OF ANOTHER UNDER FEDERAL, STATE, OR COMMON LAW (SEE SECTION 14411 ET SEQ., BUSINESS AND PROFESSIONS CODE).
Santa Monica Mirror to publish 08/09/2024, 08/16/2024, 08/23/2024, and 08/30/2024.
Event highlights include Bollywood dance on August 3, Philippine and Mexican dance on August 10, a puppet show and family music on August 17, and an animal showcase with youth bands on August 24.
In September, the fourth annual Americana in the Park series returns, presenting Americana music on Sundays at Gandara Park, located at 1819 Stewart St. The partnership with Santa Monica’s McCabe’s Guitar Shop will explore Americana music from its roots to modern forms, featuring a youth mariachi band, community sing-
Americana in the Park will feature performances by Dustbowl Revival, Mariachi Los Catrines, Los Straitjackets, Rick Shea & Tony Gilkyson, Mustangs of the West, Molly Miller Trio, The Azar Lawrence Experience, Laurence Juber, and Airfoil.
Both event series are supported by the city’s Art of Recovery community grants initiative.
