Santa Monica Firefighters Local 1109 and the Santa Monica Police Officers Association have broadened their slate of endorsed City Council candidates for the November election, adding challengers Doug Trussler and Ashley Oelsen to their earlier support for incumbent Councilmember Lana Negrete. The move, announced Tuesday, comes alongside a new voter survey the unions commissioned that points to widespread dissatisfaction with the direction of the city.
In its final endorsements, the unions may have surprised some watchers, snubbing former mayor Phil Brock, now running as an outsider, and current mayor Caroline Torosis. Brock was endorsed by the union in past elections and Torosis was a key vote in the police union earning a new contract last year.
The 2025 Police Contract
Last year, the city council ratified a new contract for Santa Monica police by a 4-3 vote with Torosis joining then-mayor Negrete, Barry Snell and Ellis Raskin. Dan Hall, Natalya Zernitskaya and Jesse Zwick voted no, meaning without Torosis the contract would not have been approved.
The split vote was caused by what was called the “number two” salary clause negotiated between the city and the police union, which would have required Santa Monica to keep police officer base pay at a minimum at the second-highest level among a comparison group of neighboring cities. The 2025 contract, covering 231 police employees from July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2029, suspended rather than eliminated that provision.
The approved contract also provided 4% raises in the first year, 5% in each of the next two years, and 4% in the final year, along with enhanced benefits. The city estimated the first-year cost of the changes at about $7.4 million, including $4.8 million from the General Fund.
The opponents argued that the “number 2” salary provision effectively allowed other cities to influence Santa Monica’s labor costs and that the roughly $22 million in additional costs over four years would limit the city’s ability to hire additional personnel or provide raises to other city workers.
Previous Endorsements
In 2020, when Brock was first elected to the Council, the Police Officer’s Union didn’t make an endorsement in the election, but two years ago the union endorsed Brock and Ericka Lesley, a rent control board member who is also running for City Council this year, then-Councilmember Oscar de la Torre (a candidate for SMC Board this year) and Vivian Roknian.
However, the glowing words for Brock and Lesley in 2024 weren’t enough to assure an endorsement two years later. None of the unions’ endorsed candidates in 2024 were ultimately elected to the Council.
The union also endorsed Negrete in her first election in 2022 after being appointed to the Council earlier in the term to replace Kevon McKeown who resigned.
Findings from the ECM Poll
The unions said the expanded slate follows polling of 250 likely November voters, conducted September 5–9 by EMC Research using phone, email and text-to-web outreach. The poll carries a margin of error of roughly ±6.2 percentage points.
The poll also probed how residents feel about safety in their own neighborhoods. Fifty-two percent said they feel safe walking alone after dark, while 48 percent said they do not — a divide that sharpens considerably downtown, where 71 percent of respondents said they don’t feel safe near the Third Street Promenade after dark. Forty-three percent of respondents said they feel less safe than they did two years ago; only 8 percent said they feel safer.
Despite that unease, both unions noted that residents still rate first responders highly: 88 percent called the Fire Department’s performance excellent or good, and 60 percent said the same of the Police Department — marks the unions contrasted with lower approval for elected officials. The survey also found that a union endorsement itself carries real weight with voters, with 75 percent saying they’re more likely to back a firefighter-endorsed candidate and 59 percent saying the same of a police-endorsed one.
Police Officers Association president Cody Green framed the endorsements as an effort to amplify resident concerns going into the fall election, saying the goal was “listening to the people we serve.”
The survey also revisited the now-terminated interim housing project for mentally ill homeless residents that Los Angeles County had proposed for Ocean Avenue before withdrawing it amid community pushback. Just 25 percent of respondents said they would have supported the project, while 56 percent said they would have strongly opposed it. Sixty-three percent said they’d be unlikely to support a council candidate who backed a similar project in the future, including 54 percent who said “very unlikely.”
The unions were careful to frame the findings as a call for more resident engagement on housing policy — including exploring workforce housing — rather than a mandate to slow housing production altogether.
