John D’Amico charted a new course for WeHo

The longtime councilmember will officially retire during Monday night’s meeting.

The City Hall that retiring Councilmember John D’Amico leaves behind is a different place than the one he entered after getting elected a decade ago. The city manager and attorney are different. His colleagues are different. And, crucially, the mindset is different. After cleaning out his office Saturday, D’Amico sat down for an exit interview with WEHOville to talk about the establishment he fought against and the one he helped build in its place.

You feeling good?

I’m feeling super excited about Chelsea being on the city council, about leaving the city in such a good shape. I think for whatever reason this was an election about highlighting the small problems we have versus the incredible, wonderful things going on. Clearly, this is an extraordinary time for the city. It’s really a great time. 

What’s special about WeHo now versus when you were first elected?

We have the Sunset Strip, which has this new life in digital billboards.  When I got I first got elected. I used to say Paul Arevalo, our then-city manager, ‘billboards are literally the flattest media around. And we need to fix that.’

And magically we fixed it in less than 10 years because sometimes government takes a long time. And depending on my colleagues in the future, we have this kind of extraordinary opportunity to make the Sunset Strip a place again. It’s about billboards and street life and action.

There is a reason why the Sunset Strip is a special place and maximizing that specialness — that’s the only option.

And sadly at the beginning of this century, the Council in place de-maximized that. They got rid of young people on the Strip, they made it a really impossible place to have a good time unless you wanted to have an event in the sky on the roof of an expensive building in a private club.

How did you fix that?

We democratized the Sunset Strip again by changing one of the very foundations of this Strip, which is advertising. All of those new billboards come with a requirement that they have an active first floor in their building. So many properties, like the corner of Doheny and Santa Monica, it’s been empty for 30-plus years because there’s a billboard on top of it. And why put a tenant in there who’s gonna complain when you have a billboard (generating income)?

There’s a future now, of an active ground plane, of an active movement through the Strip with those billboards. You can already almost feel it with the four that are up there. And then 25 percent of their time is dedicated to artwork, and then there’s the opportunity to put them all together, and have the entire Strip be a living piece of art. A two-mile long piece of art. That’s extraordinary. That is the kind of maximizing that we’re doing. 

My colleagues in the early days said, ‘we have people cruising and the billboards are a problem’ (Abbe Land).
‘What are all these urban youths coming in to the city?’ (John Heilman).

It was crazy. It was crazy talk. It was the Sunset Strip?

I wanted to be on the city council — I never wanted to be a city councilmember — mostly because it was embarrassing what this really important city was turning itself into.

Let’s roll back a bit. You got into politics because of Heilman and Land, right?

I wanted to be on the city council — I never wanted to be a city councilmember — mostly because it was embarrassing what this really important city was turning itself into.

Like this constant drone of ‘We need more families, we need to calm everything down.’ And they stopped listening to the public. They completely stop listening to the residents. There was zero interest.

The most famous, obvious example was at the Laurel House where that woman gave the city a property and then the city Ellis’d them out of that property and everyone was like, ‘What are you doing? We don’t want this. It’s not what we want.’ They went all the way to the California Supreme Court and lost and changed one thing the next day and started the whole process again. 

They’re kinda making a comeback, no?

Abbe is just a super special case. She’s been around forever. People adore Abbe Land. Her politics to me are a little wonky, but she’s a perfectly wonderful version of a West Hollywood resident ​— grew up here, matured here, became an actual professional.

I don’t know that speaking at a party means you have a comeback. And if winning by 15 votes means you have a comeback then sure, you have a come back.  I hope genuinely that that part of the city is done. This city doesn’t need to be Los Angeles. If it’s supposed to be Los Angeles, we should just stop being West Hollywood.

Is WeHo becoming just another part of Los Angeles?

I think there are people who wouldn’t hate that. Many of those people moved here for the very reason that it wasn’t, and then found that the things that brought them here ran out of steam.

And when you have a city that is 95 percent working people and people over the age of 18 who are creative, who moved here on purpose — 80 percent of people in West Hollywood moved to West Hollywood from outside of the state. People move here on purpose to invent their lives. They didn’t move here because it was stagnant. They moved here because it was changing. And they could change, and things around them could change.

So I get it. You bought a $300,000 house, it’s worth a million and a half dollars, you’re a little nervous that the value of your house might … something. Might not go up as fast? You moved to the Sunset Strip, you drank all night, you swore on the way home, you flick cigarette butts on people’s lawns. Now you’re 50 and it’s like, ‘who are those 25 year olds flicking cigarette butts on my lawn.’

And if they just looked back, or forward, they would see that that’s them. That’s us. That’s who we are. That’s this city. The city is about seizing the moment. Maximizing the moment. Not gripping as hard as we can to the past. 

Do you think WeHo is clinging to the past?

Yes, that’s what we’re doing! I did it, too. These last few years have been a revelation. Because the former city manager and my former colleagues, they were so stuck. And many of the things that I brought forward early on, they said ‘No, can’t do that. Oh no, can’t do that.’ And we did them all.

Such as?

Like give away bicycles. It’s a fucking amazing idea. We want people to ride bikes. We spent all this money on boarding people around them, the buses that go four miles an hour and take 45 minutes to get across town at $28 a ride. ‘You want to give away a $200 bicycle? It’s out of the question,’ they said. Well, it’s not out of the question. It’s actually the answer. It’s the answer in the question. I brought that forward in 2013. 

What did it take to get people on board with that?

To get rid of John Heilman, John Duran, and Paul Arevalo and the city attorney Mike Jenkins. To get rid of them. They had to go. They were stuck. They were so stuck. And it’s not a bad stuck. They were like stuck in a birthday cake. You know what I mean? They were like, like, ‘Oh, it’s just so good here. Let’s just keep playing in the bubble bath and not change a thing.’ Well, as you’ve seen everything changed and it’s got to change and it will change and it’s an exciting change. 

Wasn’t it John Duran who brought you to the table?

No. I mean, it is true that John was my first supporter and only supporter when I ran, that’s absolutely true. I don’t want to minimize or discount the fact that John supporting me was an important part of the coalition of things and people that came together in my first election. I think of John in many ways the way I think of myself. He’s a big thinker. He really thinks big and he is more interested in the impact and the success of a big thought.

Where did you and Duran diverge?

I don’t think we did. I mean, he wanted to get elected. He chose some themes that he thought would get him elected.  But in the end if he ended up being elected and I ended up being there, we would serve together and have voted the same way probably on most items. 

You’re a big supporter of Lindsey Horvath now, but she was an ally of Heilman and Land originally. You’ve had changes of heart about other colleagues, too. Can you walk us through that?

The simple comparison is that when I got elected for 12 years, John Heilman never spoke to me. Wouldn’t speak to me under any circumstances. I remember once talking to Abby and I asked ‘Is John psychologically sound? Because it seems a little weird that you go to work somewhere and your co-worker doesn’t speak to you. Is he okay? ‘ And she didn’t say ‘yes, he’s OK.’  And then I asked the same thing to Paul Arevalo. He said ‘John didn’t talk to the city manager before me for two and a half years.’ And I was like, ‘That’s fucked up. That’s a sick human being and he’s a sick human being.’

And Abbe, too — she didn’t want to talk to me. She didn’t want to work with me.

But my other colleagues — Lauren and I — we almost never disagree, except for that we agree that we have to keep talking.  And Lindsey Lindsey and I for years ,we spoke almost every morning. Iit was kind of a revelation because I never had a friend like that. A sort of business friendship.

And let’s be super clear — I didn’t get elected to get five new friends, right? And I didn’t, by the way.

John Erickson, we have become, I think, great colleagues and I hope we remain casual, communicative friends.  I hope that once our professional relationship is over, when we spin out of each other’s orbit, I hope that we can spend time together.

AndI will be the first to tell you, I was 100% not correct or confused about Sepi Shyne’s orientation towards wanting to be involved (on City Council). I was wrong. I was completely wrong. She’s amazing. She is a truly an amazing presence on that city council. She’ll be an amazing mayor. And my hope is Sepi and John and Chelsea along with Lauren, and maybe the other one, will continue to do the things we’ve been doing for the last couple years.

Here’s another image that I think has worked for me. Once Mike and Paul and John and John left, it was like the fucking dam burst. There was so much pent up energy for the change that was so overdue.

It reminded me of my own election in which I was never supposed to win. It wasn’t supposed to happen and I won and I came in first and it was clear that all of that pent up energy from the first 10 years of the decade and the century had released itself. And now it’s gonna be outreach to the community and new ways of thinking about how our urban environment exists and why it exists, and who are the developers and why do they get so much say? Why don’t we have more of a presence in there in their efforts?

One of my biggest I think successes is … sorry, I know I’m supposed to be like ‘all of us work together.’ No, I did this. I took us from the city that went from, ‘Please like us!’ to ‘We’ve got this.’ 

How did you get that attitude to seep in?

Well, I’m not sure it’s seeped in with all of my colleagues. I think it helped to get Lauren elected because you know Lauren is never a ‘please like me.’  That’s not Lauren’s schtick. Lindsey, too. She came roaring back with ‘You know what? I actually have a whole set of ideas that are not driven by John and Abbe.’ If they ever were, and I don’t think they were. She learned from that — to not stand in someone else’s shadow.

Do you feel like you still have the same favor with WeHoans as you did back then?

No, because here — news flash. — most of those people that I knew of, those 3,000 people, they don’t live here anymore. I don’t have a single friend who lives in West Hollywood. They moved to Northern California, they died, they moved to Palm Springs, they moved back east, they moved to Michigan. 

Is it the fault of the city that they left? 

No. It is exactly the right thing. Because look, I’m gonna grow old here. I watched on my block all the older gay men who grew old and died in their 90s on my street.

I think it’s false to put the changes to the demographics somehow on the politics of the city. It’s not the politics of the city. If it’s anything it’s the actual three-dimensional infrastructure of the city. This city is one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments in mostly shitty 1950s to 1990s buildings.

People move in and move out because they know that. If you live in a one-bedroom apartment, you want to have a kid, your partner moves in, now, there’s two of you in an 800 square foot apartment and then there’s two of you and an infant and before you know it you live in the Valley.

A lot of people I know who are older retired. They took their pension and they moved somewhere where it’s cheaper to live — not because we were hiring 30 ambassadors or making up a bike lane on Fountain. ‘I can’t possibly live here anymore because there’s a bike lane on Fountain’ — that’s an insanity.

But what isn’t an insanity is that living in an urban environment for year after year after year, and you want to make a change, if you want to stay in West Hollywood, there’s not much change. You live on Curson and Santa Monica or you live on Larrabee and Santa Monica. It’s kind of the same apartment buildings. 

Do you consider yourself a progressive?

The answer to that question is, I don’t actually know what a progressive is. 

I think our city council has smartly addressed items that, for too long, went unaddressed that fall into a category that I guess you would call progressive.

If having a living wage is progressive, then I’m a progressive.

If making sure that hotel workers and other workers have access to union organizing is a progressive, then I’m definitely a progressive.

If thinking really carefully and thoughtfully about the environment because of how fucked it is makes me a progressive, then I’m a progressive.

Do you think the UNITE HERE labor union holds too much sway over City Council?

UNITE HERE doesn’t have as much sway as the billboard companies or the developers. The Mani Brothers got 10 of the last 13 Council members elected.

Do you feel like you’ve ever had to make compromises to get elected?

Yeah, I don’t think compromise is a bad thing.  I’ve also not compromised and not supported things because I knew they were gonna go forward. I’d rather be part of a continuous yes than a cantankerous no.

Do you think you’re still going to be involved in city matters? 

No, I’m not. You know what? They got this. 

So what’s your plan?

I’m looking forward to reinvesting in friendships. Professional Friendships were kind of complicated especially around these parts because for obvious reasons. But all of the really wonderful people that I met along the way, I’m so glad I met them and I’m ready to invest in some new friendships.

Any truth to the rumor that you might become actively involved with WEHOville?

That’s a question for Larry Block.

Final thoughts?

I’m so happy I did this. That I and I got involved with the city and 1996 and stayed involved and then fr whatever reason or reasons decided I wanted to be on the city council. And learned a lot. But also changed the world for the better. 

It doesn’t matter to me. If you go to the fire station there’s a plaque dedicated to Helen Albert.. I didn’t know her.  But that’s the critical difference between being useful, wanting to be useful and wanting to be needed. I don’t want to be needed. I really just wanted to be useful and I think I was useful. 

Famous last words?

Cities are never finished.