By Jorge Casuso
September 21, 2009 -- Former Mayor Dennis Zane has likely had a bigger impact on Santa Monica and its Downtown than any other local activist and politician of the past 30 years.
From ushering in rent control, to creating the Third Street Promenade, to forging a City fleet of natural gas vehicles, Zane has led the charge. And he has played a leading role as advocate for regional transportation.
Yet, when you ask how he would describe what he does for a living, Zane answers, “I would have a hard time. I’m not a specialist. My life has just covered a lot of bases.”
Zane’s political career reached first base when he helped lead a coalition of senior citizens and young, long-haired activists who pushed through a rent control law in 1979. Two years later, Zane was one of four members of Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights (SMRR) to win a seat on the seven-member City Council.
Unlike the elders who ran City Hall, the new regime was brash and young and they helped forge a new identity for the staid, middle-class suburb long run by homeowners, bankers and real estate brokers. Soon, the rent control agenda grew to encompass development and environmental issues.
Zane reached second base when he became the SMRR council member tapped to spearhead the effort to convert the dying Santa Monica Mall into the Third Street Promenade. As the council liaison to the Third Street Development Corporation, Zane drummed up the crucial support of property owners and helped chart a new course for the street.
But while Zane is mainly remembered as a co-founder of SMRR and one of the key players in the creation of the Promenade, he also played a behind-the-scenes role in pointing Santa Monica towards a sustainable future.
“I grew up in Colton, California, which was on many people’s shortlist for the smoggiest part of the world,” Zane says of the city in San Bernardino County. “Air pollution is something I always had a visceral relation with.”
As a council member, Zane says he started to “nag” staff about purchasing “clean vehicles,” urging them to find funding and suppliers.
When he left the council in 1992, he planned to parlay his role in the creation of the Third Street Promenade into a job helping other cities revitalize their struggling downtowns.
“But as luck would have it, I was recruited by some friends to head the Coalition for Clean Air,” Zane recalls. His work with the coalition which included heading negotiations between environmentalists and the trucking industry -- naturally led him to an interest in regional transportation.
Zane had reached third base. For the next decade, he would help lead a movement to stop the expansion of LAX and provide a network of regional airports.
“The growth in the region was going to be in the Inland Empire, in Orange County, and a big part of this puzzle was planning ground transportation...rail systems and bus systems.”
Zane was working on the planned “Subway to the Sea” when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced it had run out of money.
“Here we were in LA, with congestion the worst it had ever been, gas prices reaching $4 a gallon and projections that there would be three million people added to Southern California,” he recalls. “And there was no money.”
Zane approached former Santa Monica planning Commissioner Terry O’Day, and the two launched a successful campaign to fund transportation with a half-cent tax hike.
But if Zane has “covered a lot of bases” during his 30-year political career, he has always stayed close to home – as both a trusted advisor to SMRR and as a father fighting for a better School District.
