Sign our petition to let the Santa Monica City Council know that you support keeping circus local in Santa Monica by keeping the Santa Monica Trapeze School (SMTS) on the Pier!

Santa Monica has long cast itself as a champion of small businesses and a beacon of sustainable and smart development, which is why millions of people a year flock here. Yet the process for small businesses to lease – and maintain – commercial spaces is broken and this dysfunction is currently playing out in what is happening to SMTS on the Pier. It is true that massive, multinational companies can pay higher rents because it is a loss leader for them but they don’t attract local people. Apart from shutting down unique small businesses and individual operators, these huge ventures threaten to destroy the Santa Monica brand. That special sauce that makes our city different from hundreds of other oceanfront locales who have succumbed to corporate greed and lost the very thing that made them remarkable in the first place. This is an existential strategic issue regarding Santa Monica’s future. If Santa Monica truly wants to support small businesses as they claim they do, the way to do this is to support businesses like the Santa Monica Trapeze School.

For more ways to get the word out, view our tool kit.