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By Jorge Casuso
August 21-- Randy Little has been all around the world,
including the Arctic Circle and the South Pole, but he has found
few places as clean as Santa Monica.
“There’s an environmental awareness,” says Little,
the City’s new landscape manager. “It’s the cleanest
city I’ve ever seen. I was very conscious when I had a piece
of trash in my hand.”
Making sure there are plenty of places to throw away that scrap,
and that it gets picked up if it ends up on the ground, is Little’s
ultimate task.
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| Randy Little (Photo by Lookout
Staff) |
A big man who played football in college, Little is in charge
of making sure Santa Monica’s public spaces, including the
Downtown, are trimmed and spruced up. And although the San Diego-area
native finds the 8.3-square-mile beachfront city clean, that doesn’t
mean there isn’t room for improvement.
“My main personal goal is to increase our efficiency and accountability,”
Little says. “I’m learning a lot. I’m challenged
and rewarded every day.”
To meet his goal, the former football player and Coast Guard member
has instituted a six-step cleaning program that includes an inspection
of all public facilities every 30 days. When it comes to the Downtown,
staff walks all the streets, alleys and parking structures from
Wilshire Boulevard to Colorado Avenue and 2nd to 5th streets.
“We look for safety hazards, fire hazards, landscaping, graffiti,
the overall conditions of the restrooms,” Little says. “We
find a lot of graffiti. It’s very prominent in the alleys.”
There’s also all the waste from restaurants that “throw
things in the street that they shouldn’t, grease” and
other garbage, Little says. “It all ends up at the beach,”
which Little is in charge of keeping clean. “It’s nice
to see where it’s all coming from,” he says.
Pictures of problem spots, such as an untrimmed tree or an overflowing
trash bin, are photographed, taken care of and the results are again
snapped for the record. Little also keeps a “baseline matrix
of the frequency and duration of what we do.”
In addition, the maintenance department is installing a new “web-based”
work order system that allows staff to enter requests for service
and track the status of the order. Reports are then emailed to staff
members informing them of the status of the work.
The system will make it easier to schedule work and should help
prevent problems from cropping up by nipping them in the bud, Little
says.
Little – who in addition to overseeing all landscaping and
maintenance Downtown is in charge of the beach, the Pier and the
Airport – is looking forward to the $1.5 million in enhanced
maintenance bankrolled by the new Property Based Assessment District
(PBAD).
Approved by Downtown’s 260 property owners last month, the
district will be run by an overhauled Bayside Board, which will
set policies for the Downtown. Although the City Council has not
yet decided if the work will be contracted or done by City employees,
Little is looking forward to the chance to better clean the Downtown.
The additional money will be used to pressure wash the Promenade
and surrounding sidewalks more often, scrub the public restrooms
more thoroughly and clean the parking structures more than the current
schedule of once every eight weeks.
“It’s a team effort,” Little says. “It’s
all about customer service.”
Little became interested in landscaping when he was four or five
years old growing up in a 50-acre grove of avocados, oranges and
lemons outside San Diego. Little remembers how “the trees
looked at sunrise with the light coming off the rays of the sun.
It was very spiritual.”
Little befriended the grove workers, then joined them in the field
until he was 15. He played high school football and won a scholarship
to U.C. Davis, playing until “both knees were blown out.”
Little joined the Coast Guard and traveled the world – Fiji,
Hawaii, New Zealand, Chile and Peru. He worked in a lighthouse on
the East Coast and traveled in an icebreaker to Antarctica and the
Arctic.
Nominated as the hardest worker on the ship, he was rewarded with
a trip to the South Pole, where, to his surprise, the scientists
had set up a “full-blown vegetable garden” and “a
bar with a band.” The lighting effect that attracted him to
the grove as a boy made it appear as if “seven suns were on
the horizon” at the bottom of the world.
When he returned, he worked for the City of Vista for 15 years,
then as a landscape construction manager for a large developer.
“The economy took a horrible turn, and they had to let everybody
go,” Little says.
That’s when he spotted the job opening in Santa Monica and
was impressed with the work of Elaine Polachek, the open space manager
for the City.
“She seemed to have a vision, and a keen sense of where the
department was going,” Little says. “I wanted to be
a part of that.”
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