LOS ANGELES — With its iconic landmarks and celebrity residents, Beverly Hills is one of the most famous and most filmed cities in the world. Millions of tourists travel just to shop on Rodeo Drive and star gaze along Sunset Boulevard.
On this week’s “In Focus SoCal,” host Tanya McRae sits down with Beverly Hills Mayor Julian Gold.
The native New Yorker graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, The City College of New York and NYU School of Medicine. In 1994, he moved to Los Angeles with his wife Michele and their daughter Rebecca.
While practicing as a board-certified anesthesiologist at Cedars-Sinai and a local medical group, Gold became active in the Beverly Hills community. In 2002, he was appointed to the Traffic and Parking Commission, and then the Recreation and Parks Commission where he served until he was elected to the Beverly Hills City Council in 2011.
On a one-year rotating basis with other council members, Gold is currently serving his third mayoral term.
“Amongst the things I’ve done that I think have been good, and started in that first year, was, I recognized that we were not supporting our younger generation as well as we should,” Gold said. “The city was kind of an older, focused city, and the next gen — the 25- to 45-year-olds — I thought, were underserved,” he said, referring to the launch of a program so their voice could be heard.
“I created a next gen committee. We call it ‘Next Beverly,’ and it starts with, ‘You don’t know what you don’t know.’ I didn’t know what drove their generation,” he said.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Gold created a monthly town hall style meeting called Office Hours with Dr. Gold, where the community shares their thoughts and ideas. He discussed some of the bigger issues that have come up during those conversations.
“I think safety, public safety is first and foremost in everybody’s mind. We’ve had several years of for a variety of reasons for a focus on that, and the city has spent a lot of time, energy and money really tightening up our security. And I think nothing’s perfect, but we’ve created a much better, stronger, smarter police force,” Gold said.
Gold also discussed expanding Beverly Hills medical services through an innovative health initiative that merges the city’s existing mental health, physical health, emotional health under one roof in order to better address the medical needs of residents.
“We have a lot of health services, probably the cornerstone of the current one is our nurse practitioner program, which I helped create about five years ago, where we actually have nurse practitioners embedded with our fire service, and they become part of that response as appropriate,” he shared.
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