A Holiday Bu-bar-cue

Ari L. NoonanSports

More than baseball, more than my wife or children, more even than mush-brained liberals, I dearly love secret-keepers. Especially elected secret-keepers. Every morning, they leap directly from bed to their favorite full-length mirror. Pompously, they preen their way through three different poses before putting on their pompous clothes, the better to strut their way through another — oh, must we? — pompous day.
  

In the Year of Our What?

 
Such thoughts of terribly inflated grandeur floated through my little mind while ruminating over a tiresome event at last Tuesday night’s School Board meeting. In the Year of Our School Board, Double Oh Six (that is how long they have been together), the act is wearing a little thin. Like the widely ignored shopkeeper who begs customers to step inside, the School Board has such a small following I could shlep all of them to the meetings in my little red wagon. Better yet, I could bring the School Board to them. So few people bring inquiries to the Board, you would think they might offer a free chocolate milkshake to anyone who can think up a substantive question.

It’s Holding, Holding, Holding

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

Nervous anybody?
 
It’s too early to tell whether the third and latest tentative contract agreement between the Teachers Union and the School District will be the one that takes. The contractual terms are exactly the same as the last agreement reached on Friday, May 12. “What happened was just a misunderstanding,” said Teachers Union President David Mielke. After initialing the deal on a Friday, Mr. Mielke determined three days later, on a Monday, that the terms weren’t what he thought they were. He promptly called off the agreement. It took a week to get the two negotiating teams back to the bargaining table. In the presence of a mediator for the third time, they needed about an hour and a half to hammer out the same terms as before regarding post-retirement healthcare benefits.

Early Father’s Day

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

Two years ago this summer, the last time I saw my father, he shuffled up the slight incline in front of my sister’s home as if it were the tallest mountain on the continent. I couldn’t believe how deliberately my formerly vigorous father was moving. By last autumn, he had slowed a little more, necessitating the acquisition of a cane and a walker. Outside of the house, they tell me, he always uses one or the other, usually the cane because he feels the walker impedes him. But the walker is appealing when he takes his daily constitutional because it has a seat for relief when he gets winded, which is about halfway through. A month ago when Pop visited one of the numerous doctors he calls on, an x-ray of his lungs revealed an unexplained spot. Once Pop returned home, thirty miles later, panic set in. He and my stepmother, who spend their days in large side-by-side drop-back chairs, sat down on the couch and had a lusty cry.

Teachers’ Settlement Is Back on

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

      After one week of off-stage bickering after settling and unsettling, negotiators for the Teachers Union and the School District amicably reached a settlement yesterday afternoon on a two-year labor contract. “Essentially, the conditions are as they were before,” Union President David Mielke told thefrontpageonline.com. “It was just a misunderstanding.”
 
The Teachers agreed to a concept they first had accepted on Friday, May 12: Teachers hired on or after July 1 will qualify for retiree healthcare benefits after fifteen years of service, and their spouses will qualify for coverage after twenty years. The coverage amount, $3,207 annually for one or both partners, will be negotiated at a far future date “because $3207 won’t buy anything,” Mr. Mielke said. A ratification vote for members of the Teachers Union is scheduled for Tuesday at each school site. “We should know the results by 5 o’clock,” said Mr. Mielke.

The ‘Suit Is in Heidi’s Court

Ari L. NoonanSports

Selecting his words prudently, the lawyer for Police Officer Heidi Keyantash told thefrontpageonline.com yesterday morning, “We are going to proceed toward trial.” The next court date on Terry Goldberg’s calendar is Thursday, July 6. Is the hour later than the defendants realize? Ms. Keyantash’s blockbuster suit  against former Mayor Albert Vera and City Hall — first revealed to the community by The Front Page last Aug. 26 — is heating up this week. Charging the recently retired mayor with defamation, discriminatory behavior and harassment, Ms. Keyantash is seeking an award that may reach the tens of millions. When the case was suddenly exploded two years ago weeks after Mr. Vera thought it had gone away, his instinctive response was to say the police set up his son. That felt juxtaposed. Mr. Vera traditionally had cast the police as his heroes. When the circumstances became known — Mr. Vera’s son was stopped for a five-years’ late registration and hit with a drug charge — Vera supporters alleged the accusations stemmed from a police vendetta against the father.

Dispute Over Budget Report

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

Is that all there is? City Councilwoman Carol Gross asked, grouchily, when the Chief Administrative Officer completed his ballyhooed report on the financial state of the city to the City Council on Monday night. Ms. Gross was positive she had heard the same tune whistled somewhere before. Then it came to her. Jerry Fulwood’s thirty-five-minute presentation sounded like the one he delivered last year.

Union, District Meet Today

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

Negotiators from the School District and from the Teachers  Union are scheduled to sit down late Tuesday afternoon and attempt to unknot a deadlock caused last week by the Union. After initially agreeing to a new labor contract that would have ended two years of increasingly hostile talks, the Teachers Union changed its mind on Monday of last week. The dispute, according to the Union, covers retiree healthcare benefits for the spouses of teachers hired after July 1. The District’s offer was for a single capped amount of $3207 per year, with the teacher qualifying after fifteen years of service and the spouse after the teacher has put in twenty years.

No Blemishes on This Police Chief?

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

Whatever internal unrest may have surfaced after Culver City selected its second new Police Chief in two years has receded, sources say, and they are crediting the new chief himself. Don Pedersen had critics even before the critics knew his name. The critics had wanted the City Council to choose Asst. Chief Hank Davies, but Mr. Pedersen nosed him out, three to two. The learning curve that would confront any outsider is offset, say Pedersen supporters, by the fact he comes into Culver City with a shiny slate. No prejudices, no grievances, no preconceived notions about who should be upgraded or demoted now that he holds the keys. So far, he seems ideally calibrated, maintaining a pleasant balance between his duties toward his officers and toward the regular people, City Hall and the community.

Stand for Something

Ari L. NoonanSports

I would imagine the roughest part of the day for Erin Aubry Kaplan, the Times’ often brattish commentator on cultures of color, is arriving at a traffic signal. The angry little lady probably is puzzled by which light to get mad at. At the red one because green is showing? Or the green one because the red is showing? She appears to prefer amber because amber does not force her to make a commitment. She can stop, a little. Or she can drive on, a little. Life can be such a nag when you are shilling for the affirmative action yahoos. My, my. Living with Ms. Mad must be a riot. (Fortunately, she is one of the few women with nose-holding attitudes whom I overlooked in my now terminated Wife-for-a-Few-Years Derby.)

Getting to Know the Chief

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

Just as a fourteen-day-old marriage is not proof that the two tenderfoots will make it to fifty, two weeks of shiny new police chiefing in Culver City is a not a guaranteed magic bullet for whatever the prognosis is for the Police Dept. Early assessments of the forty-five-year-old Don Pedersen dwell on three points that seem to separate him from his two immediate predecessors: He is visible, he is upbeat and he is congenial. “A few days isn’t really much of a test,” one veteran officer told thefrontpageonline.com. “I am not sure how much you can genuinely tell about him yet, about how he will react under fire. At least for now, he seems to be everywhere around the station, meeting people, genuinely interested in getting to know all of us. He does not shy away from anyone.”
 

Says the new chief: “My style is to learn everything I can about the department, and you can’t do that sitting in the office. I will do that by going to see where people work, seeing what’s important to them, seeing what issues they think are important, and seeing how I can help them do their job better. That is my primary job. The better taken care of the men and women here are, the better they will do out in the community, providing services.”