Santa Monica's mayor says the economy is going through bad times

4years ago

California news, US news.

In California, the mayor of Santa Monica, issued a forecast for the city's economy as it is going through hard times due to the pandemic.

“Things are financially pretty grim. We want to get the city reopened as quickly as we can, but we need to protect people, not only from each other but from themselves. Our local economy has tanked. We are a tourism town. People have been coming here for over 100 years. Tourism has ended for the time being,” Mayor Kevin McKeown said in an interview.

McKeown added that his city will be down by around $224 billion for the next two years, an amount needed to fund "police and fire, to pick up the trash, to have clean, pure water in the pipes."

"So that's going to mean other services now in this city have to be cut. And that's very hard to do,” he said.

“We've had recessions before, but never anything that happened this suddenly or this deeply that took that much money out of the city coffers so quickly,” he said.

The mayor described Santa Monica as "the home of the three-piece bathing suit: a bikini and a face mask,” now that the city's beaches are open for recreational activities, even if parking lots are still closed and people can't sunbathe or go in the water.

McKeown criticized the federal government for not implementing more relief funding for cities that are suffering economically.

“It's been about 10 weeks since I really had a good night's sleep or had a day off. I'm not saying that for pity. It's just the reality of trying to run a local government in these unprecedented circumstances,” he said.