2016: Small argued to keep Police and Fire leadership under direct Council control
Measure CA proposed moving appointment and reporting authority for the Police Chief and Fire Chief from the City Council to the City Manager. Small and his co-signers opposed that change. Their official filing presented direct elected supervision as democratic accountability: residents could pressure Councilmembers, Councilmembers could act on the chiefs, and voters could remove Councilmembers.
The opposing campaign described the same arrangement as Council politics and argued that department heads should report through the professional City Manager structure.
The political network predates the Council term
Contemporaneous reporting on Small’s January 2016 campaign launch records Kelly Kent speaking in support of his candidacy and calling for closer City-school-district cooperation. The later Measure CA filing then placed Small and Kent alongside Fisch, Sahli-Wells and Wallace in a documented instance of coordinated political activity.
That documents a specific political intersection; it does not establish coordination on every later policy position.
2017–2019: direct oversight becomes governing structure
Separate Police Chief and Fire Chief performance evaluations appeared before the City Council in closed session in 2017. In 2018 the City created an Ad Hoc Police Liaison Subcommittee to review Police Department initiatives and provide Council-member feedback and direction.
A fresh scan of File 16-784 also confirms that the 2017 Sanctuary City matter included several requests from Culver City Action Network concerning CCPD immigration practices. The individual roll call for that matter remains unresolved and no individual Small vote is recorded here.
2020: Small enters the Police Liaison structure
A May 11, 2020 staff report listed Meghan Sahli-Wells and Goran Eriksson as Police Liaison Subcommittee members. By June 22, official staff material identified Goran Eriksson and Thomas Small as the subcommittee. The exact appointment motion remains missing, but the membership change itself is documented.
Verified public-safety roll calls
These are the individual votes currently recoverable from official records. The table is deliberately narrower than the list of matters discussed during Small’s term: missing votes stay missing until the record supports them.
| Matter | Small | Lee | Fisch | Sahli-Wells | Eriksson |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| June 5, 2020 emergency + curfew ordersSmall moved; Fisch seconded. Passed 4-0-1. | AYE | ABSTAIN | AYE | AYE | AYE |
| June 22, 2020 FY2020/21 City budgetFile 20-1066. Fisch moved; Small seconded. Passed 4-1. | AYE | NO | AYE | AYE | AYE |
| July 13, 2020 use-of-force + public-safety reviewFile 21-30. Small moved; Sahli-Wells seconded. Passed 5-0. | AYE | AYE | AYE | AYE | AYE |
The June 22 vote covered the full City budget. File 21-30 has its own item-level vote record.
July 13 consent calendar: approval context, not invented roll calls
Files 21-11 and 21-20 were consent-calendar items. Their child vote endpoints have no separate vote rows. The parent consent-calendar record does: Fisch moved, Small seconded, and all five Councilmembers voted Aye.
Unresolved vote records
Move Culver City: Small described the quick-build as adjustable
The project corpus preserves a 2022 interview in which Small described Move Culver City as tactical urbanism and a temporary pilot that could be adjusted and changed. That statement is useful when evaluating later political arguments over whether the project’s configuration should be treated as fixed or revisable.
A preserved Culver City Coalition article is sharply critical of Small and reproduces underlying source images concerning Move Culver City, Culver City Forward, campaign filings and conference appearances. The article is an advocacy source; its editorial conclusions remain attributed rather than being presented as official facts.
Culver City Forward: a documented post-Council intersection
Project material reproduces a Culver City Forward leadership page identifying Small as President and CEO and showing Kelly Kent on the organization’s leadership page. A 2020 records-request letter in the archive also addressed Small in his asserted capacity as Culver City Forward’s chief executive and copied Kent.
The correspondence proves the request and how its author addressed Small. Stronger claims about compensation, funding relationships or conflicts should be tied directly to the underlying corporate and tax filings before being presented as independent fact.
Small’s 2026 candidate statement
Small’s candidate statement published by the City presents his governing philosophy as integrated planning and credits his prior tenure with work on the General Plan Update, the Ballona Creek Bikeway Extension, City finances, housing opportunities and outside funding.