Samuel Thompson

I'm a 29-year-old business owner who is recently married and newly a homeowner in District 2 of Redondo Beach.

I've spent the last 14 years of my life building and running companies, primarily in the technology and marketing industries. I've founded and exited a handful of businesses, and I currently run Quicker, a MarTech holding company, with my two best friends (and our 40+ amazing team members).

I mention this for one reason: the kind of analysis I do on this site — reading budgets, evaluating revenue mixes, looking at deal structures like the Marine Avenue Authority Funded Reserve, thinking about a city the way I'd think about any organization with revenue and expenses — comes from work I've actually done. I read P&Ls for a living. I've signed payroll. I've negotiated the kinds of deals — vendor agreements, financing arrangements, partnerships, acquisitions — that share a lot of structural DNA with the deals a city signs every week.

I also understand the day-to-day work involves what running any people-heavy business involves: hiring, firing, managing expectations, managing organizational culture, hard conversations about performance, and the regular humbling that comes from being responsible for outcomes other people are counting on.

The exercise of writing here is partly an extension of that, and partly a way to apply what I've learned to a place I deeply care about.

I'm not a journalist, a lawyer, a planner, or a former public official. The credentials I bring to civic writing are operational, not professional.

I think those credentials are exactly the ones missing from most local civic discourse — most of which is dominated by retirees, lawyers, and activists with strong opinions but no firsthand experience of running anything with a meaningful payroll or customer (citizen) base.

I'd like Better Redondo to be a different kind of voice.

Better Redondo focuses on a specific set of civic topics where operational experience and data analysis add the most value:

• City budgets & finance — revenue analysis, General Fund health, capital improvement spending, fund balance trends
• Land use & development — zoning changes, housing element compliance, the AES site, the Galleria redevelopment, waterfront lease negotiations
• Infrastructure & public works — PCH corridor planning, bike infrastructure, streetscape improvements, parking policy
• Council & commissions — meeting coverage, voting analysis, policy recommendations, public hearing summaries
• Economic development — tourism strategy, hotel tax policy, business environment, the 2028 Olympics impact
• Real estate & housing — market trends, property values, affordability, development pipeline

I think this city has all the assets to do extraordinarily well.

I think it is currently not doing as well as it could to maximize its potential.

The waterfront. The harbor. The pier. The Esplanade. The Riviera. The Galleria's long-overdue redevelopment. The corridors — PCH, Catalina, Hawthorne, Artesia — that connect the city's parts to each other. The slow, patient work of making a city function well at the everyday level: sidewalks that don't trip you, streetlights that work, parks that someone obviously maintains, a downtown stretch you'd want to walk. The kind of fiscal discipline that lets a city afford the services its residents need without bleeding money on avoidable mistakes.

A planning process that takes residents seriously, in every neighborhood, not just the loud ones.

Long-term thinking about what this city looks like in 2040.

I care about these things because Redondo has the most underused collection of civic assets of any city on this coast, and because the people who live here — in every part of the city — deserve a city that lives up to the place it sits on.

Better Redondo is a civic project, not a campaign. I am not running for any office. I do not represent any party, slate, organization, or interest group. I am not paid by anyone for this work.

The Mission page lays out the operating commitments of the project in more detail.

If that ever changes — if I were to run for office, take a position with the city, or accept any role that would create a conflict with this work — I would say so plainly, on this page, and the relationship between Better Redondo and any new role would be disclosed in full.

Until that happens, the simplest description is also the most accurate:

I'm a resident who writes about the city I live in.

If you have a tip, a correction, a document I should look at, or a disagreement with something I've written, I'd genuinely like to hear it.

I read everything that comes in, and I keep sources confidential when asked.