Re “Exceptions Should be Made for Senior City Workers, Malsin Says”

[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img]When a well-known figure around  City Hall finished reading City Councilman Scott Malsin’s seemingly self-serving blast-the-city essay yesterday in the Culver City News, he cracked sardonically:

“Scott never has been accused of being a team player, and here he goes again.”

If the members of the City Council are to be viewed as evenly and faceless as the four anonymous black tires on your car, Mr. Malsin is the whitewalled, wirespokes exception.

It is his nature.

Yesterday’s 650-worder is a reworking of an interview Mr. Malsin did with this newspaper two months ago, on June 24.

He promises new chapters the next two Thursdays on his website culvercity2020.org, where he explains:

I've created this website to share my thoughts on the future of Culver City and on how we can make it as bright as possible.

At a glance, the essay appears harmless. Do more than glance.

The City Council is intended to operate as a five-member equally weighted team, not a five-direction machine. His colleagues say that he takes one step out in front of them too often to say “Look what I have done for Culver City.”

That is one of the several main reasons Mr. Malsin, again in this case, is a lone wolf who routinely has strayed from the pack.

He said this morning: “I could not have lived with myself if I had remained silent on this important subject that directly affects so many good and loyal employees.”

Except he has not been silent at all. His views have been previously published, and he has publicly expressed them to community members. When word of the latter, a speaking engagement, quickly leaked back to City Hall, some persons were horrified.

In the process of yesterday’s essay, he disparaged the judgment of his colleagues on the City Council. He cares, they don’t seemed to be the message. Both the style and the content became irritants today.

All of that is prologue, of perhaps tertiary significance, because Mr. Malsin avoided the beating heart of the matter — a discussion of himself.

His skin is at issue.

He never told readers that his benefits are at risk, a gargantuan oversight or fact to ignore.

For months he has publicly parried the question of whether he will stay or go to shield himself from the shrunken benefits.

An objective observer familiar with the facts would scan yesterday’s essay and judge that Mr. Malsin’s ostensibly charitable concern for dozens if not hundreds of city workers whose health benefits will melt four months from Tuesday, actually is a self-advertisement.

A reader who did not know Mr. Malsin’s seat on the City Council is at stake because of the change in benefits never would realize the piece actually is one big fat arrow aimed directly at the Councilman’s skin.

Why else resurrect this evidently settled question that two of City Hall’s six unions already have accepted unless the purpose is to cover  yourself ?

The single salient point — since he already has aired his views and can’t possibly have much more to say — is:

Will Mr. Malsin choose to stay on the Council and surrender major benefits or leave by Dec. 31 to protect them?

Coyly, he declines to answer by deflecting his response, maintaining that his entire intention is to talk about workers and their benefits’ losses.

Sister Teresa or Dr. King may have listed self-preservation low on the list.

That would not be true for you, for me or for the author of the essay.