A Major Decision

Dear NOMA Friends and Neighbors - 

Last week, the Board of NOMA made a momentous decision: we are not applying for City grant funding this year due to the unnecessarily restrictive new rules imposed by the current City Council. Below is the letter we sent to City Manager Oliver Chi and the City Council explaining our position. 

This was a difficult but necessary decision. Despite years of the grant process working well for all parties, the current City Council altered the grant rules in ways that would limit our ability to advocate for you, our residents, and require us to solicit our members' personal information, including income, age, and home ownership status. The new rules seem designed to control and sideline neighborhood groups and we found these changes unacceptable. 

Despite this change, NOMA is not going away. We will continue our mission to educate and inform our residents with our monthly meetings, host community events, and advocate for the issues you care most about. If anything, our resolve is now even stronger.

But we can't say that the $7000 we received annually from the City will go unnoticed. We have significant operating expenses and rely on your membership support now more than ever. If you aren't currently a dues-paying member of NOMA, or have not donated in a while, please take this opportunity to show your support for what we do, and the decision we have made – to remain a strong, independent, and effective neighborhood organization – by becoming a member or upgrading your membership today.

We are grateful for the support of our NOMA neighbors who consistently show up to meetings and events, keep themselves informed on local issues, and join us in pushing back against City Hall when they disregard the tax-paying residents of our community in favor of special interests. NOMA is here for you, and we humbly ask that at this time of great change, you will be there for NOMA and our community. 

With gratitude, The Board of NOMA

PS You can read an article about our decision in the Santa Monica Lookout HERE.

March 19, 2026

TO: Santa Monica City Manager Oliver Chi
CC: Mayor Torosis and City Councilmembers
RE: Neighborhood Organization Grants

Dear City Manager Chi - 

We appreciate all the effort you put into the new Neighborhood Grant Program, as directed by City Council. Unfortunately, the Board of the North of Montana Association (NOMA) regrets to inform you that we will not be applying for the grant this year due to the new, onerous requirements imposed by the current Council. 

For decades, neighborhood organizations like NOMA have had a positive, mutually beneficial relationship with City Hall. Members of City Staff and Council have come to our meetings to introduce themselves to residents, explain new programs, and get resident feedback on important issues. Grant money helped underwrite our mutual goal of educating residents and increasing community involvement. The current City Council disregards this longstanding relationship, mandating unnecessarily restrictive and punitive changes with no clear objective as to what the changes are meant to solve. 

Our decision is based on three key points: 

1. Council cited increased "transparency" regarding how City funds were being used, as a fundamental reason for changing the terms of the grant. But this ignores the fact that neighborhood groups were already required to provide City Staff with annual accounting and receipts for every dollar of grant money spent. The new restrictive requirements – that funds be pre-approved and are only permissible for event-related purposes – solve no identifiable problem, but have the effect of reducing NOMA to a social club, limiting our ability to advocate for residents. Since its founding – when a group of NOMA residents joined together to fight for zoning changes to stop the proliferation of McMansions – our role has always been to amplify residents' voices through collective advocacy, not simply to host picnics and parties. We are unwilling to abdicate that responsibility now.
2. Grant money was always permitted for newsletters and other forms of outreach to our residents but is no longer allowed. The newsletters we send to every resident in our area (not just to our members) are the most important form of outreach we have. They educate residents about new city and state policies and programs, promote new local businesses, and impress upon potential members the importance of having a collective neighborhood voice, all in an effort to encourage people to get involved. Previous City Councils recognized this important outreach and, prior to the grants, the City paid for printing and mailing neighborhood newsletters. Previous City Councils wanted us to have more members and more community involvement. Eliminating this use of funds will result in less-informed residents, fewer engaged dues-paying members, and a greater dependency on City funding. That is contrary to our mission. 
3. Arguably the most troubling new rule for receiving grant money is that groups must agree to solicit demographic information from their Board and members. The idea, posited by City Council, that the City needs member demographics in order to see how it lines up with Census Bureau statistics, suggests that groups are somehow excluding people or are restrictive. This is an utter fabrication. We welcome anyone to join our group; we have open meetings where anyone can participate, and our goal is always to inspire more membership, representing the widest demographic range possible. Council's new demographic rules show a distrust of our commitment to inclusion among our residents, and imply that Council will judge the value of our groups based on who we are rather than what we say. 

While we will no longer receive grant money, we intend to continue our mission to represent our residents and remain a valued partner to the City. We hope that future grant requirements will be changed so that we can once again benefit from the City's support in our mutual goal to make Santa Monica the best city it can be. 

The Board of NOMA