AND THE WINNER IS…ARMEN MELKONIANS Posted on December 30, 2014 by Peggy Clifford If there were a Santa Monica Prize and residents awarded it to the person who had made the most significant improvement in Santa Monica in a given year, Armen Melkonians, a civil and environmental engineer, would be this year’s winner. Nothing anyone else has done, and a number of people have done laudable things, has had a more positive and powerful impact on Santa Monica than Residocracy, which Armen devised. City Hall had almost literally tied residents in bureaucratic knots, rend- ering them helpless to act in their own best interests and in the best in- terests of their gloriously idiosyncratic beach town.In response, Armen devised Residocracy, a form of direct democracy that restores residents’ most basic and benign power– veto power. Residocracy enabled residents to stop the Hines project, end the developers’ control of the Council majority, and gave them the means to stop other projects and policies that threatened to diminish and/or damage this beloved beach town. Now, for the first time in many years, thanks to Armen and Residocracy, residents are truly represented by the City Council majority and are ready and able to control growth, preserve this beach town’s character, and restore democracy. Ironically, about the time Residocracy restored Santa Monica’s democratic process, a group of distinguished scholars from Princeton and Northwestern declared that American democracy had been replaced by an oligarchy — but, here and now, democracy flourishes, thanks to Armen Melkonians.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 02:28:24 +0000
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