News Articles

Last Thursday’s crucial Metro Board vote, confirming an elevated light rail terminal for Culver City as well as funding for the last leg of the line into Culver City, turns out to be an exquisitely timed piece of government business.

Now 18 weeks before his eagerly anticipated retirement, Steve Cunnningham, a chronic candidate for being The Most Overlooked Person at City Hall, finally may receive his just due.

While the highest level officials in City Hall were accepting congratulations on Thursday afternoon for their splendid good fortune, uniformly they were quick to aim the arrow of major credit in the direction of Culver City’s Director of Transportation.

What distinguished yesterday’s overflow, afternoon-long campaign kickoff/fundraiser for City Council candidate Andy Weissman was that it attracted a boatload of Culver City’s best known personalities to the sunny, tree-shaded home of Jozelle and Ken Smith.

So many people turned out for the political pep rally — “Andy told me to expect between 65 and 2,000,” said Ms. Smith — that no one who was absent was even missed.

“A spectacular coming-out party,” the candidate said briskly and triumphantly in the afterglow.

Less than 24 hours after the Metro Board pumped fresh and dramatic hope — plus tens of millions of dollars into Culver City’s link to the Expo light rail line and to its projected elevated terminal — City Hall announced this morning that the last two property owners in the pathway of the planned light rail complex have gone away, reportedly financially satisfied.

City Hall can exhale and breathe easier.

As of this afternoon, Culver City’s long dreamed of but never confirmed aerial light rail station stands to be built, now that funding — $50 million worth — has been approved.

Further, $145 million in funding for the final link in the light rail route — from mid-town into Culver City — in financial jeopardy a month ago, also was approved.

Ivy hip and college-fresh, complementary chums since their Manhattan Beach schooldays, not many years ago, Greg Reitz and Steve Edwards could have been just returning from successful auditions for a revival of the old “Ozzie and Harriet “ television show.

A blend of tradition and modernity’s latest incarnation.

At a spare outdoor table in front of the trendy Conservatory for Coffee, Tea and Cocoa that caters to the youthful nearby studio crowd, Mr. Edwards and Mr. Reitz, both 35 years old, easily could have passed for rising studio executives or for frontline actors.

On another routinely bombastic Monday evening in Council Chambers:

• Two infuriated partisans of the ousted Edge Swim Club unleashed an acerbically personal attack on Mayor Alan Corlin and a rhetorically unorthodox assault on other members of the City Council.
• Normally the City Council’s response is ho-hum when City Manager Jerry Fulwood announces he would like to pull an item from the agenda for further study. But two Council members became inordinately distressed last night when Mr. Fulwood asked to postpone a discussion of the city’s green policy until January.
  

On Monday, Farragut Elementary School will officially dedicate the school's new Computer Lab, which was made possible by a $36,500 grant from Symantec Corp. An additional $24,300 was raised by Farragut parents.

The event will begin at 8:45 a.m. with a schoolwide assembly honoring Symantec. This will be followed by a 9:15 dedication ceremony that will include parents, teachers, students, School Board members and School District Supt. Dr. Myrna Rivera Coté and more.

Thanksgiving Day, in a few hours, may feel like a mixed blessing for dozens of neighbors of a proposed Hayden Tract redevelopment project that is the latest budding battleground in what is beginning to resemble a permanent state of war between Culver City residents and builders.
The geography of the redevelopment shifts into new neighborhoods, but the human contours do not change.

The rhetorical template for these battles keeps getting used over and over.

How do you know Election Season has arrived?
Scott Zeidman, School Board member-elect,
announced this afternoon he is joining 11 former Culver City mayors, four of the five current City Council members, School Board member Jessica Beagles-Roos and fellow Board member-elect Steve Gourley, in endorsing Andy Weissman for a seat on the City Council next April.

“Andy is bright, informed and involved,” sad Mr. Zeidman, the leading votegetter in this month’s School Board election.

In an unusually passive decision, the City Council concluded last night that it is not government’s responsibility to protect young skateboarders who may be jeopardizing their safety by refusing to wear mandated equipment at the city’s new Skateboard Park.

Instead of cracking down on the hordes of equipment-law violators, as one family has been pleading for the Council to do for weeks, members adopted a laissez faire attitude.