Joint meetings of governmental agencies rarely are staged, the conventional wisdom goes, because, just as in show business, each group jealously guards the exclusivity of its own time in the public limelight.
When the City Council hosted a joint meeting with the Parks and Recreation Commission early last evening in Council Chambers, the two groups may have demonstrated why such intersections are so widely spaced out.
Part 2
[See earlier story, “Elmont’s Challenge in Board Race: Sorting Out, Choosing Cogent Data,” Oct. 12.]
School Board candidate Alan Elmont has been exploring options for making Board members more available to inquiries from the community during the school year, since interactive dialogue is not permitted at Board meetings.
First of two parts
There is almost no disputing that Alan Elmont, ultra-attentive parent, is the most roundly informed candidate in the Nov. 6 race to fill two seats on the School Board.
Between him and his wife Teri, they have attended/participated in “more than” 99 percent of School Board meetings during the past dozen years.
Hardly a community secret.
Listening to Jessica Hall last night at the monthly meeting of the Culver City Democratic Club was not unlike drifting noiselessly in a canoe downstream in Ballona Creek on a warm, lazy and cloudless afternoon.
She is the Stream Restoration Coordinator for the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission, which made it impossible to hide the subject of a story she related with both grace and insight.
At first, business owner Peter Messinger harbored dark suspicions about the true, but perhaps hidden, purpose of the letter he was reading with a measure of disbelief.
For a year and a half, the owner of The Aquarium, at the corner of Sepulveda Boulevard and Sawtelle, was one of the most vocally aggressive merchants on South Sepulveda fighting a huge redevelopment plan.
After Mayor Alan Corlin made a valiant but lonely and losing attempt to professionalize the coming Utility Users Tax campaign last night, the City Council resembled a kitten playing with a ball of yarn when it became deeply entangled in trying to demystify and defend the dense, newly downsized mixed-use ordinance.
Both measures passed by wide margins. But a funny thing happened to each on its way to victory. They took very different paths to approval.
When City Councilman Steve Rose was reviewing the freshly refurbished limits for the controversial mixed-use ordinance — that will be debated by the Council at tonight’s 7 o’clock meeting — his eyes stopped roaming when he reached the novel concept known as Community Benefits.
Too vague, too broad, Mr. Rose contends.
As a group, the City Council cheered last July when Councilman Scott Malsin introduced Community Benefits as a compromise solution between builders who strive for bigness and neighbors who, almost uniformly, prefer petite structures.
[Second of two parts. See “It Is Time to Confront Thorny Issue of Permits,” Says Contender Zeidman,” Oct. 2.]
With less than a month to go before the School Board election on Nov. 6, the candidate C. Scott Zeidman is getting the kind of instant education all first-time campaigners encounter:
Twenty days before JoAnn Harris — six months pregnant — was gruesomely murdered on the afternoon of Aug. 24 at the National Guard Armory, the Culver City police reportedly were warned that the signs of a pending homicide were in place.
The informant allegedly also told the police that the suspect had attempted to recruit three different persons to assist him in the execution.
This would indicate Ms. Harris was not killed in an outburst of passion, as has been speculated, but that the crime was mapped out well in advance.
Did Culver City police respond in a covert manner or ignore the claim?
Brainy, ambitious and focused, he is a very active partner in a world-class business that carries a high-profile in the entertainment industry, and he also practices law.
But the man who brings the most unusual resume to next month’s School Board race says that his primary identity is being the parent of a third-grader at El Marino Language School.
As an independent entrepreneur who is very much in charge of his professional life, C. Scott Zeidman closely charts his son’s progress.
