Ryan Blomberg
For Santa Monica City Council
I'd like to use the ability to build and program tech, which is much easier these days, to help people come together and build things that meet people's basic needs at low cost and low maintenance. My website shows the idea for a city site that can monitor all locations and get data in real time, with QR codes all around the city that connect to a shared database with all of city government. The QR codes could let people say what they like or dislike, or just share a story. The vertical gardens should be automated, easy to set up and tear down, so they can be moved.
// why i'm running
Why I'm running
Coming from a broken family, I spent my life chasing existential answers, esoteric magick, material things — often out of a fear of loneliness.
But something happened that I wasn't searching for.
As I began putting my personal desires aside and made it my goal to read the biblical texts for myself, I experienced something I can only describe as the light of God. It hit me.
For a moment, I felt an ultimate contentment, unlike anything I had ever experienced. Suddenly, all those things I'd heard people in churches say about feeling God's presence didn't sound like words anymore. I understood what they meant because I had felt it for myself.
And it changed me.
Through the words of Jesus, the New Testament, and the apocryphal texts, I began looking at life differently. I realized I didn't have to fear being alone when I had God with me. I stopped believing that fulfillment had to come from what I could obtain or experience for myself.
I began to see that one of the greatest pleasures in life is trying to live virtuously and be useful to other people. I'm a work in progress, not perfection.
I prayed about what I should be doing with my life. Then I met Daisy, and the opportunity to run for Santa Monica City Council seemed to fall directly into my path.
I don't claim to know exactly why everything happens. But I know what I want to do with the opportunity I've been given: serve the community that once helped me rebuild my life.
// priorities
What I'd work on
Five things, in order. Each links to a fuller explanation of the issue.
Public safety that actually responds
Staffed, responsive police and fire for the emergencies only they can handle — paired with a dedicated crisis-response capability for the behavioral-health and substance-use calls that consume so much of their time.
Homelessness work measured by outcomes
Fund what demonstrably moves people into housing, treatment, and stability. Publish the results. Include people with lived recovery experience in the response, because they're often the only ones who get through.
Spending residents can actually audit
Santa Monica's budget should be readable by a resident in an evening. Before we ask for more, we should be able to show what the last dollar produced.
Small business and empty storefronts
Cut the time and cost of opening something here, and stop letting prime ground-floor space sit dark for years while the block loses its foot traffic.
Transparency as infrastructure
Agendas, contracts, budgets, and response data should be searchable and summarized in plain language. This is a solved engineering problem; it mostly requires deciding it matters.
My approach
- Define the outcome before funding the program
- Publish the data, including when it makes us look bad
- Pilot small, measure honestly, expand only what works
- Treat residents as capable of reading real information
- Say 'I don't know yet' instead of inventing an answer
// full positions
Every issue, in detail
Ten issue pages covering the full scope of what the council decides.