Santa Monica City Attorneys Office discovered a new tech, just declare something a “public nuisance” and then act like the phrase is a force field that automatically solves the problem. Sometimes it even does solve a problem.
But watching SM CAO sprint their way into a headline-grabbing lawsuit with Waymo/Voltera because of overnight EV-charging operations makes me wonder whether SM CAO is practicing law… or practicing toothless legal demands with billable hours. And I’m open to discussion here: did Council get misled into treating something as a nuisance that isn’t one in practice? Because this depot is just about as quiet than any Santa Monica library branch (that’s still open depending on the day of week...)
Here’s where the inconsistency causes the SM CAO’s legal foundation to crack, nobody seems to feel bad for the residents at 1412 17th St. They’ve been living with a drive-thru intercom next door until 2AM like it’s a nuisance grandfathered into the city charter.
In terms of actual public nuisances: the Pavilions Motel in Ocean Park has been rightfully out of operation with their business license revoked and is now up for sale. The City’s own nuisance complaint said five dead bodies have been found at the property since 2019 (at least three tied to drug/alcohol abuse). The City was dealing with it as far back as 2007, yet the place was allowed to fester for years before the City finally filed its nuisance abatement lawsuit in May 2024. So: a motel with a long track record, repeated questionable enforcement history, and bodies? a multi-decade slow-walk. A charging depot that can be pretty quiet in person and runs similarly to every other EV charging lot in the city? Rapid escalation and legal brinksmanship.
Now let’s compare to other cities fighting questionable “public nuisance”.. The siracha maker Huy Fong was sued by city of Irwindale for spicy air outside their pepper cooking industrial kitchen. Irwindale tried to use public nuisance powers over “offensive” odors even when regulators found no infractions. There’s an interesting Seton Law Review that dived into how cities can use legal privileges to exclude outsiders/new businesses. I’m not saying Santa Monica is Irwindale, or that this is the same fact pattern. I am saying: when a “public nuisance” becomes, we the people listen to those who shout the loudest, it often ends up as selective enforcement and expensive litigation and tends to benefit the people with the most leverage and loudest access, not necessarily the people with the most harm.
Which brings me to the part that the City Attorneys Office should be on board with the City Manager on, we’re in fiscal distress. Santa Monica has been openly and transparent about structural deficits and fiscal emergency/distress conditions. So why is the City Attorney’s Office burning time and money picking a fight that predictably ended up in court with a corporate heavyweight? EMaybe I’m wrong but it sure looks like the City is positioning itself to lose, or at least to spend a fortune to land at a settlement it could have reached with serious, boring, competent mitigation work before turning the “nuisance” label into a press worthy headline.
Why does the City move at lightspeed on some nuisances? While other, clearly disruptive problems that affect people get parked in the “maybe tomorrow… maybe never” folder for years?
I agree with basically everything you've written here. If the residents believe their rights are being infringed upon by Waymo, they are welcome to mount their own efforts to get the depot moved elsewhere. The city bringing suit here is completely stupid and a waste of money at a time when there isn't any to waste.
And, not for nothing, it's pretty rich to hear the people who fought so hard from keeping that space from becoming housing now complain about the noise from autonomous cars when the depot is placed between two enormous hospitals with emergency departments. I work over there occasionally and the ambulance noise doesn't stop.
What’s the full back story on them fighting housing on that site? All the housing opposition in this city is a bit of a blur at this point & I failed in my efforts to pull up an article.
I truly don't understand the city's attitude toward Waymo. As the article said, Santa Monica approved the permit for the lots, and knew they'd be open 24/7. Waymo apparently has made several good faith attempts to resolve the concerns at hand. The city also constantly gives lip service to the idea of walkability/public transport, and electric rideshare cars would seem to support that goal. And being antagonistic to a business that WANTS to be in Santa Monica and is making multiple attempts to work with the city seems to be a bad idea at a time the city is hemorrhaging money. This "just shut down your business operations at night, we won't compromise" stance seems absurd.
Every resident has a right to quiet enjoyment of their home. This right has been recognized going back to medieval common law. Waymo is infringing on that right with its incessant all night noise. It is 100% within the city's purview to bring an action on the part of the impacted public. Using your logic, it should be up to the individual homeowners to hire a private fire department when a fire breaks out. It’s part of the social contract for local government to stand up to big business. Shutting Waymo's shit down at night is perfectly reasonable compromise.
Right to quiet enjoyment does not mean cars can't exist near you at night. My understanding is that the core issue is that the federal government requires EVs to make a certain amount of noise so they are just complying with the law.
Generally quiet enjoyment would protect you from excessive noise, not all noise, but you're just not going to see something be deemed excessive noise if it's just following what was mandated by law. The fix would be to try to get exemptions to those laws so the vehicles could operate more quietly during the night.
We’ll see what the courts say. EVs are loud. I can hear every EV that pulls into my building, let alone 50-100 at a depot in an endless stream. Have you visited the site at 11:30? Operating a depot is loud. Courts are reasonable. I predict Waymo will have scaled back operations at these depots in a couple months. If Waymo wants to operate a depot near residential property, they should expect limitations and restrictions such as reduced hours of operation to accommodate the surrounding community. Again, this could have all been avoided with proper site selection from the get go. I suspect these decisions were all made by tech bros in SF who are hell bent on industry disruption with no understanding of and care for the local community in Santa Monica and the risks of operating near residential.
Yeah, we can definitely see what the court says. But I'll also say it was the city that permitted that location to Voltera for use as an automated EV charging facility including specifically 24/7 operation. The city said it was okay and after the location was bought/leased and developed is now trying to make the other companies involved eat the cost for their own poor city planning.
Plus, in response to the complains Waymo already, according to local articles, "reduced reverse beeping noise by more than 90 percent through software updates developed in consultation with federal regulators, installed landscaping and barriers to block light and sound, prohibited vehicle vacuuming between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m., and modified traffic flow to reduce congestion." They also later disabled vehicle lights during charging.
We'll see how it plays out in courts, but usually if one party has shown a willingness to compromise and mitigate issues and the other is making more unrealistic demands like prohibiting vehicles from queuing in nearby alleys, limiting facility access to one vehicle at a time, and establishing a half-mile overnight circulation restriction around the facilities then the courts aren't going to look as favorably at that.
Unfortunately as a city you can't say that something is okay and then randomly change your mind after investments have already been made and permits have been issued for those specific things.
That’s where you’re wrong. The city can put new conditions on any project based on the conditions on the ground. The issue will be whether those conditions are arbitrary, in this case they do not appear to be so due to the impacts on the neighbors, or whether the conditions defeat the project altogether. In your bizarro world, cities would seem to be toothless once a permit issues, and that is certainly not the case. Santa Monica has a notoriously strong planning board relative to other jurisdictions and routinely imposes conditions on projects to satiate the local community.
Your attitude is inspiring residents to mount a campaign against your frivolous claims.
What Councilmember is going to run for re-election (in 26 or 28) by saying “I stopped Waymo because 4 next door neighbors complained?”
It’s not about stopping goofy Waymo. It’s about making them operate responsibly and in accordance with community standards and expectations. It’s a winning issue. A future candidate could argue: “I fought to improve quality of life. Now I’m ready to take on petty crime, drug addiction, and other quality of life matters impacting neighborhoods.” Most residents support a fighter looking out for the little guy, not the Silicon Valley tech bros.
“I fought to improve the quality of life“ is straight out the NIMBY playbook.
Let’s be clear - not a single council member has publicly supported your position. You don’t have council support. Those who live single family homes could care less about your inconvience. Those who pay $5K a month to live in a 1960’s dingbat care about affordability and building new housing. Those who care about our city’s finances know you could cost SM millions defending your inconvenience. Families and women feel safe in driverless cars and will not support you.
Who in city hall is championing your inconvenience?
Merry Christmas. Touch grass.
Quiet enjoyment has nothing to do with this case. Hopefully this isn’t the legal advice people have been receiving. Quiet enjoyment is an implied landlord-tenant covenant in the state law about a landlord securing a tenant’s quiet possession of the rented premises, it’s not a free-floating medieval common law right you’re alluding to.
SM CAO acting like they can just “turn it off at night” the way the city does with their airport prohibiting take offs is the SM City Attorney’s Office putting its cluelessness on full display. The City owns and controls the airport (within a regulatory framework), so curfews and operational limits there are a completely different animal than trying to order a permitted private operation to shut down overnight by fiat.
Ok Chat GPT lawyer. "It shall be unlawful for any person to make, produce, maintain, cause or permit to be made any noises or sounds in such manner so as to unreasonably disturb the peace, quiet and comfort of persons of normal sensitivity within the area of audibility," the city letter states, citing municipal code provisions. Go back to your shilling for a bozo company.
Quoting the code isn’t the same thing as showing an actual enforcement record. I’m not “shilling for a bozo company” I’m advocating for prudent time and resource management by our city attorney’s office, which as someone else pointed out is being run by a temp (to the tune of 395k a year and has a deputy writing letters to multinational tech company with a multi trillion dollar valuation with less than a decade of Bar admission)
Where’s the administrative paper trail? Copies of Notice of Violation / administrative citation (case number, date/time, issuing department)? How did the city’s administrative review process look, did the neutral party (administrative hearing officer) consider and uphold any citations? Any noise measurements, logs, or officer observations? Was any of it attached to the City’s complaint / demand as exhibit?
Romy Ganschow’s letter didn’t include any of that from the public record showing Code Enforcement actually cited Waymo/Voltera for violating the muni code you quoted.
The CAO did a major misstep and just counted of all the 311 requests and city is too lazy to investigate with empirical evidence.
I’d dial back the “go back to shilling” routine and direct your outrage at Code Enforcement and the CAO for not working with the company to resolve the issues they seem to be working in good faith to fix eg from the recent press story- “a second curb cut access point, vegetation barriers, solid walls or fencing, and awnings to reduce noise and light impacts”.
Edit: I read the bar admit date wrong so fixed that part- still unimpressed though.
Not sure how you got that logic about fires, but I find it interesting you think Waymo is noisier than the constant ambulances from the nearby hospitals, the constant construction, the E train clanging along every few minutes late into the night, the 10, the constant bus noise that anyone near the depot or a major street has, the truck unloading noises every morning that anyone who lives near a supermarket has, and so on. Talk to people in some of the Lincioln Blvd buildings who have been listening to jackhammers for literally years because of the new buildings going up around them. Your neighbors deal with all those noises all day and night, but we have to stop beeping cars for you?
The city deciding to antagonize a multi billion dollar company providing a useful service because a few residents living in a city are annoyed about city noises is ridiculous.
The train stops running at midnight. Seems reasonable for Waymo depot.
It stops at midnight and is rolling again by 4:30am. And in the meantime the train depot is open all night for maintenance and cleaning, you know, just like Waymo, because they have to maintain the trains. They absolutely move the trains around outside of passenger hours. Same is true for the bus depot, where they have buses coming in until late, starting again early, and moving around in the middle of the night. The bus depot's also across the street from Santa Monica's main post office/sorting station so you have mail trucks all night too, right down the block from the 10 and near the animal shelter where they often have dogs barking.
It's interesting how all those people around those noises can deal with it and move on, almnost like they realize they have chosen to live in a city and people's livelihoods and services don't revolve around them.
Very strange hill to die on
Maybe the neighbors can petition CPUC and/or compel SCE to stop aiding and abetting this “public nuisance”. GLHF!
Maybe the city can allow residential construction overnight
LMAO they already do quite often. And all of those other city noises are also round the clock or close to it.
No they don’t. Overnight construction is prohibited.
try talking to more people around SaMo if you truly believe that. There have been overnight permits allowed, as well as some service days starting at 6am, for a lot of the buildings going up, such as the one the new Vons is located in and the one next to Mel's and the 10. The developers have to send notices out, but it happens.
Well said!
A private taxi company, self driving or not, is not “public transit”. Public transit is a non-profit, subsidized public good/ service. Waymo is for profit and not cheap.
Sorry, no. There's no necessity for it to be nonprofit or subsidized.
US Cambridge Dictionary: public transport
noun [ U ]
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/public-transport
Waymo meets the second definition, as do a lot of other modes of transportation being promoted in lieu of personal car use such as commercial bike, scooter and ebike rentals that have been given public street space - which are also for profit and not subsidized. And regardless, the overall goal is to reduce dependence/usage of personal vehicles, which Waymo does accomplish. If you don't like it, fine, but many find it a service that improves quality of life and mobility.
OH Ok ! glAD yoU loOKed At a DictIonary, to ignore YEARS of nuanced PolicY and uRbAn plAnnIng pReCedeNt. Let me AsK my SourCe- CHATGPT:
“Waymo can technically satisfy a dictionary definition of public transit because it is transportation available to the public for a fare, but that definition is doing far less work than it seems. In practice, public transit is a publicly planned and accountable system meant to move large numbers of people efficiently and reliably, whether or not each trip makes money. A bus ride might cost $1.75 in Los Angeles or $2.90 in New York, with monthly passes that reduce the per-trip cost even further, because the goal is access and throughput rather than profit per ride. A Waymo trip, by contrast, is priced like a taxi or rideshare, often $15, $25, or more for a single passenger or group, and operates only where demand and conditions make sense for the company. Taxis have always been available to the public for a fare and yet have never been considered public transit, precisely because they are private, individual, on-demand services. Waymo fits that same category, which is why it may be publicly accessible but still is not public transit in the way people actually use the term.”
But in all seriousness- public transit would be an ok term if the city of SM subsidized Waymo service for residents to reduce costs for all Waymo rides, to a fixed, low standardized fare. That would leave the city on the hook for 90% of fare costs- which Im almost certain 60% of that cost goes to pure margin that goes straight to shareholders. And because of the low cost, that would just drive up more demand- leading to more individual Waymo usage and clogging our streets. That money does more and goes further if it’s spent on more efficient and consolidated methods of moving large groups of people around and spending money on capital improvements for those things- ie. Train lines, busways, gated crossings, bike lanes, streetscape improvements, bus stations, island boarding, and better signage. It does not go further by propping up a gadget-bahn known as “Waymo”.
Using ChatGPT as a reference or citation invalidates any and everything you have to say. I don't read generative AI regurgitations.
BTW if we want to use your original definition, which I'm sure came from as sage and educated a place, rideshares ARE subsidized by the government in Santa Monica. Lyft is fully incorporated into the city's MODE paratransit program, which is administered and funded through Big Blue Bus.
How are people in this sub calling waymos public transit. Lmfao. I guess shit doesn't have meaning anymore.
I guess uber is public transit too! Guys we solved our public transit infrastructure!
Jfc.
Apparantly a waymo is like a bus or train to the guy replying to you.
Imagine telling the average person in Tokyo or Seoul that westerners consider taxis public transit. Lmfao.
For regulatory purposes, yes, it’s classified as a common carrier, meaning it offers service to the general public without discrimination. And you could reasonably argue the City has a built-in conflict too, since it operates its own common carrier too and shutting this down helps them keep their ridership up.
Eh. I don’t think I would ever use a Waymo as a replacement for bbb. Only as a replacement for uber.
They did (going back a decade) use to have the Blue at Night service from 17th St metro stop to your door which was pretty nice. I’d always consider BBB along with other transportation options like Waymo/Uber, it’s mostly a matter of how much time vs money you want to save to get somewhere, and you can’t take a bike or a kid without dragging a car seat along on a Waymo.
Okay? That still doesn't make a taxi public transit.
Taxis play a role but that does not make it public transit. Idrc and idgaf about the rest. I found it amusing that a comment that correctly pointed out that waymos are not public transit for downvoted and then some idiot replied to him with a definition of public transit that TAXIS do not apply to.
Academics and scholars aren't out there calling goddamn taxis public transit jesus fucking christ
You are aware the city of Santa Monica uses Lyft as part of paratransit, and other cities use rideshares for that as well, right? It's literally being used as an extension of Big Blue Bus, in a program administered by BBB.
Academics and scholars ARE correctly incorporating a lot of modes of transit into overall public transportation networks. When someone incorrectly defines a term, finding the actual established definition is what educated people do, sorry if that is something you're unfamilar with. Have a lovely day!
This sub is plainly being astroturfed by Waymo. The positions in here are laughable.
This is a terrible look for the city. I thought we were pro business & safety now??? I loved how Dr. Jonathan Slotkin, a neurosurgeon at Geisinger Health System framed Waymo as solving a public health crisis in his NYT article. They are already 91% safer than human drivers and will only get better. Cities should be bending over backwards to roll these out as fast as possible. We complain about reckless driving and pedestrian deaths but use city funds to create a frivolous lawsuit? Waymo's save lives. This will look horrible in retrospect.
Seems like these comments are astroturfed by Waymo. Euclid is a residential street. Neighborhood serving businesses cease operations at 7 pm - 10 pm. Folks who live around these charging stations are rightfully pissed. When permits were approved, I don’t think the city appreciated the secondary impacts of a 24 hour charging business, specifically the noise of cars backing up. Cut operations between 10 pm and 7 am and folks will be happy. Otherwise move your goofy charging station to an industrial part of town where 24 hour warehouses operate. City seems reasonable here but goofy Wayno doesn’t want to scale back operations. Bad Waymo. Huge nuisance. Next stop Waymo from using limited street parking or put on a massive autonomous vehicle tax for the privilege of hoarding a public resource.
The property is on Broadway and is one of two charging stations on that street. The second property is not receiving any complaints.
Google is going to fight this with all of its might as having local town councils call it’s legal operations a nuisance in order to kick it out is a threat to its business model.
The City’s Attorney Office is not prepared to handle the coming lawsuits. They are understaffed, lack the expertise and are under the leadership of a temp. The city is in financial hardship and doesn’t have the money to pay for outside council.
Those who are complaining have also been unable to rally support from residents. It seems nobody wants to burn their political capital for this cause.
Proving a nuisance isn't rocket ship science. Waymo's charging stations are not a legal operation if the round the clock noise interferes with the surrounding public's right to quiet enjoyment of their property. Waymo is a joke. Tax the shit out of them and kick its ass in court. "Local town councils" as you call them enjoy tremendous power under their police powers authority. I am rooting for the city hard on this one.
Purely from a cost-benefit standpoint it’s probably cheaper for you to relocate than for the City to light a pile of taxpayer money on fire over a non-issue. If you’re that convinced Waymo is clearly in the wrong, skip the outrage and go full capitalist: sue them for private nuisance, get a settlement, and take either enforceable conditions, or enough cash to relocate to a McMansion in Sunset Park along with the rest of thr “I moved to a city and now I’m mad it’s a city” crowd
I'm sorry the city is using public money to enforce the law and that angers you. If you want a more hands off local government, move to Texas. Waymo is filing suit here, not Santa Monica.
If what Waymo was doing was illegal, it would have already been shut down. So please.
Those few residents who are causing this ruckus are going to be in for a rude awakening. Public record requests, discovery and their names in international news are samples of what is coming their way.
In Santa Monica they will become pariahs. It’s already well known that the minutiae of their complaints don’t hold water against reality. They are going to cost us millions of dollars in legal fees - and that means no money for schools, libraries or more police.
What Santa Monica really needs is a new City Attorney, not a temp who is simply saying yes.
Then the city has failed us by not declaring the airport a public nuisance. Or declaring the Wilshire a public nuisance and shutting it down.
Both Waymo charging stations are on property zoned for commercial uses. Residents are free to move, too.
The city will need to defend itself in court. Counculmembers will come under fire for listening to the few instead of fighting for the good of the many. And the money needed to open our libraries will need to be spent on lawyers and staff.
exactly. It's trying to placate a few residents to the detriment of many. There are people who work the overnight shift on those Waymo lots, and their jobs are at risk from the city's stance. The city should not be picking this fight.