Mc Keown Aims for 20/20 Vision

Carolanne Sudderth

Mirror Staff Writer

   Kevin McKeown bundles the ream of paper that is this week’s Santa Monica City Council packet into his backpack, and pedals down the bike path toward a quiet beachfront cafe to study the issues. 
   McKeown was elected to Santa Monica City Council last November, running on the Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR) ticket. His victory shifted the balance of power, giving a clear majority to SMRR, but he’s not the newest Council member; Asha Greenberg’s sudden resignation followed by a special election last April gave that distinction to Richard Bloom, also a SMRR member. 
   With just over six months behind him and a four-year term ahead of him, McKoeown has that shiny new curiosity that indicates a neophyte. He’s anxious to learn, working hard and enjoying the experience immensely. 
   What he didn’t expect, he said, was “many times more work than I could ever have imagined.” This hasn’t dampened either his energy or his enthusiasm for the job. He loves it. “It exercises my intellect, engages my heart and expresses my spirit.”
   But there’s a hint of conflict there, too. In almost the same breath, McKeown said, “I’m trying not to get too caught up in the job.” 
   “I’ve gone through a transition in choosing to be out front. I was always the guy behind the scenes. I’m basically a shy introspective guy.” 
   McKeown tosses a leg over his bicycle, and the bike path becomes the yellow brick road back to his childhood. “I get to be with me-as-a-kid. I remember that life is fun.” He carries a photo of in his wallet to remind him of who the “real Kevin is.” 
   The “real Kevin” is a laughing six-year-old in a parochial school uniform. (Check it out at (http://www.mckeown.net. Double click on “Who is Kevin?”) He lived in New York City. His “good Irish Catholic parents” sent him to parochial school and later to Jesuit priest seminary. 
   When he was 12, his father died. He and his mother moved to Connecticut and he went to a public high school where he was pushed ahead and graduated two years early. 
   “I was really young emotionally,” he says a little sheepishly and so he spent two years at a prep school before heading off to Yale.
   “It was a weird world for a poor Irish kid,” he laughed. “Everybody else’s father owned a corporation.” 
   It was at Yale that Kevin discovered radio. “I was a science kind of guy,” majoring in astronomy and physics. His interest in the latter drew him to the campus radio station where it was agreed that he could push the buttons and play with the equipment, if he did time on the air, too. 
   “And that became my first career.” In 1976, after a two-year stint at a San Diego radio station, he moved north to Santa Monica and a job as KROQ’s general manager. In the late 70s, when FM radio was becoming a business, KROQ was the last of the so-called progressive stations. When they moved on to a “rock of the 80s” format, McKeown moved on, too, into advertising. He was made creative director of a local agency, and received an award from the First Advertising Group of Los Angeles. 
   His interest in computers is long-standing. “I’ve been using e-mail every since 1982—and that’s 1982,” he said, “before Al Gore invented the internet.” He got involved with Santa Monica’s infant PEN network and became the first chair of the Pen User’s Group. That, he said, was his introduction to “community-on-line” and “to all those other activists in Santa Monica.” PEN got him involved in community politics and McKeown began to be aware that he could make a difference.
   He marched against the hotel on the beach that had been proposed for the 415 site (the old Sand and Sea/Marion Davies estate.) and for Proposition S, which banned further hotel development on the beach. A decade later, McKeown saw his fight end happily when new plans for 415 were presented to the Council. “I was thrilled to be sitting up on the dais approving a public beach facility [for the 415 site]. “That’s what I was fighting for 10 years ago.”
   He went on to join and later become chair of the Wilshire/Montana Neighborhood Association and helped found the North of Montana Association (NOMA). City politics became an ever larger part of his life. He got involved with the SMRR steering committee and was appointed to the Santa Monica Telecommunications Group.
   “I recognized the next step was the City Council. I thought about it, and I went for it.” 
   He senses what he calls a “political sea-change” in the community as renters and homeowners recognize a common interest in issues of development, the environment, parks and education. And in the increasingly congested traffic, which McKeown attributes to an out-of-balance job-housing ratio. “ Our nighttime population is 80,000, our daytime population is 250,000, and on the weekends, it’s close to half a million.”
   “We have all become aware that the community is over-built, and the ones benefiting are developers and the attorneys who work for them, not the residents, whether they rent or own.”
   Another pet concern is a city-sized radio station to beam city government to Santa Monicans who can’t get to the meetings or don’t have cable TV. “We have money set aside in the budget, we will be on the air as soon as the FCC [gives us the go-ahead.].”
   The Federal Communications Commission is currently considering a revision of its rules to allow licensing of very low-power stations with a radius of three to five miles. “Just enough to cover Santa Monica. Only 50% of Santa Monica homes have cable television, while 80% to 90% have FM radio,” McKeown said.
   A few City meetings are broadcast over City TV, a cable channel run by the City. The Council meeting is available through radio station KCRW but only between 8 p.m. and midnight, though meetings often run much longer. 
   McKeown is anxious to implement his “2020 Vision” program, (sub-titled “Kids are the Santa Monicans of the Future”). The program sounds as if it is a product of his own one-working parent family. 
   “2020 vision would start with infants and provide, year-by-year, child-care and a nurturing network that would allow kids at every age to “go out, have an adventure, skin his or her knee, and know that they’ll be taken care of.”
   “By the year 2020, every kid will have grown up having support at every phase. I don’t think there’s anything more important in the long run than taking care of kids.”