Councilmember Traci Park Speaks at Pacific Palisades Community Council Meeting

By SARAH SHMERLING | Editor-in-Chief

Councilmember Traci Park spoke at the most recent Pacific Palisades Community Council meeting on Wednesday, June 26, touching on a number of topics, including acknowledging the transition of the PPCC leadership team, the upcoming Los Angeles Olympics, homelessness, public safety and more.

“I don’t know if your experience with the passage of time has been like mine over the last year, but boy, there are not enough hours in the day or days in the weeks or weeks in the month,” Park said of her time in office. “But tonight, I am excited to be here because I get to have the opportunity to bid farewell to our outgoing officers and to extend a warm welcome to our new leadership team.”

June 26 marked the last PPCC meeting with Maryam Zar as president and Sue Kohl as vice president, with Kohl stepping into the role of president effective July 1 and Quentin Fleming taking over vice president. Jenny Li will continue to serve as treasurer and Beth Holden-Garland as secretary, and Zar moving into chair emeritus, replacing David Card.

“I have every confidence in your ability to lead the group,” Park said of Kohl. “I know that you are going to bring integrity and wisdom and thoughtful consideration to this role, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to have you as a partner in this.”

Since taking office in December 2022, Park has served on various committees at City Council, including as chair of the Trade, Travel and Tourism Committee and the Ad Hoc Committee for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles.

Park said she was “thrilled” when she was given the opportunity to chair the Olympics committee, but following a March trip to 2024 Olympics host city Paris, Park said she “developed [her] own personal connection to the material.”

“I will tell you that I came back with a renewed sense of purpose, but also panic about all of the work that lies ahead in terms of getting our city ready for the entire world having their eyes on Los Angeles,” Park said. “There is no sugarcoating this: They have a long way to go and a lot of work to do to get ready for it, but I welcome the challenge.”

She will return to Paris in August and study what is happening during the Olympics, including the metro, crowd control, amenities, bathrooms, a mobile application and more.

Beyond her committee commitments, Park said over the course of the last year and a half, “the issues of homelessness and public safety” have remained “top of mind across the entire district.” When she took office, she said the “district was in absolute crisis at that point.”

“There was no community, there was no neighborhood that wasn’t drastically impacted by the homelessness crisis,” Park described. “We hit the ground running … we have done more than a dozen major operations and encampment interventions where we have now housed more than 600 people who were living in tents all over Council District 11.”

Park explained that CD 11 has “one of the highest rates of retention in housing” and that the district is “moving people more quickly into permanent supportive housing than anywhere else in the city.”

“We had so many different … service providers operating in different parts of the district with no cohesive plan or joint mission or set of goals or outcomes that everyone was working together to achieve,” Park said. “So we started by getting to know these organizations one on one, and then we brought everybody together into one room, and we agreed that we were going to stop working in silos … and work on our operations jointly across the district.”

She reported that while Los Angeles Police Department remains at “critically dangerously low staffing levels,” the department is working to rectify that through “very aggressive recruitment and retention efforts.” Park said she is working on implementing interim solutions, including expanding pilot programs.

“I’m very pleased and grateful to Mayor [Karen] Bass for her leadership on the public safety issues,” Park said. “She has been a great partner to me and to the district in addressing some of those challenges.”

Following Park’s update, she took questions from the PPCC board and audience members, including about safety issues on Pacific Coast Highway, potentially securing funding for cameras for the highway beyond the stretch in Malibu.

“You’ve got my commitment to work with Senator [Ben] Allen to get it done,” Park replied.

For those who wish to stay updated about what is going on in the district, Park suggested signing up for her newsletter, which goes out once per week, at cd11.lacity.org.