That's Not Your Money

I am extremely troubled by recent actions of the Hermosa Beach City Council and city leadership.

The Hermosa Beach Kiwanis Club has held a Christmas Tree Lot fundraiser on the Hermosa Beach Community Center lawn - on the corner of Pier Avenue and Pacific Coast Highway - for over 30 years.

For the first time in history, the city is proposing charging our non-profit organization - roughly $9,000 - for the use of a storage building and the Community Center lawn. The issue lies not with paying the reseeding for the lawn, but with council attempting to "create" revenue at the expense of a non-profit.

The same council - which discussed waiving the fees for AVP's commercial volleyball event last year - initially approached Kiwanis with a charge amounting to 5% of the gross sales generated by our fundraiser. Be mindful, non profit organizations across the board are struggling to continue their operations during these difficult times.

Where are the funds raised by Hermosa Kiwanis donated to? For the past 94 years, we have supported:

scholarships; youth arts, music, and sports programs; local causes and other non profit orgs; building and maintaining historical landmarks; facilitating student leadership programs and service projects; and much more.

At the end of 2019, Hermosa Kiwanis donated $15,000 to the Student Wellness Counseling Program at Hermosa Valley, to have counselors available for students to discuss issues like bullying, divorce, stress, and other issues impacting our children. This year, our club also distributed over $25,000 in scholarships to students from Hermosa Valley, Mira Costa and Redondo Union.

The fees proposed by council would be stripping 20 scholarships from next year's graduates.

The "tax and spend" strategy - historically employed by council members and politicians everywhere - is not designed to include non-profit organizations. Instead of subsidizing the efforts made by non-profit groups, our cities leaders propose an initiative that will impede our Hermosa Kiwanis club from offering scholarships.

Council members, this proposal is not representative of the desires of your constituents - it is not in the best interest of our residents. If the city imposes these costs on Kiwanis, then who is next? Women's club, Sister Cities, Rotary, Friends of the Park, Friends of the Library, and all of the other non-profits that raise money and give it back to the community.

For a city council member to remain silent- this constitutes consent and endorsement of taking 20+ scholarships from our future graduates. The city will always need more money. But non-profit organizations will not be the source of those funds in Hermosa Beach.

(Note: these comments are solely representative of my views, and my perspective is that of a non-profit volunteer and life-long member of the Hermosa Beach community)