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.
For the entertainment of a four-person audience, as Commissioner Charles Deen pointed out, they wrestled in the dirt for an hour over a fairly specious subject, how and who to choose from the community for two focus groups.
The separate but reportedly equal 20-person focus teams are to make recommendations for the parks’ revamping scheme known as the Master Plan.
A Sea of Opinions
Stiff sentiment was broadly, but not unanimously, expressed against appointing familiar names who volunteer or often manage to be chosen for similar study groups.
That left a shakily outlined profile of faceless residents to ostensibly form the pool of most desirable selectees.
First Confrontation
After Vice Mayor Carol Gross opened the meeting with a stinging scolding of Parks/Recreation Director Bill LaPointe — necessitating multiple interventions by City Manager Jerry Fulwood — the principals settled into a cloudy, rambling, indecisive 60-minute taffy pull.
Reviving an occasionally recurring theme with subordinate City Hall agencies, Ms. Gross charged Mr. LaPointe with purposely or carelessly shielding from Council view pivotal steps Parks and Rec has been taking throughout this year in gradually completing the early rounds of the Master Plan.
One Note Meeting
The entire meeting — preliminary to the regularly scheduled weekly City Council meeting — was consumed with a single topic. The most, possibly only, creative suggestion of the meeting may have come from Commissioner Jeanette James. She urged the consulting company to post survey questionnaires at every city park so that ordinary people, regular park users, could roundly participate in the process. “Maybe this would spark conversation,” she said hopefully.
The only drama last night was frontloaded, confined to the first thundering minutes.
In a session that was a consultant’s dream — 5 million words spent, no clear-cut decisions rendered — Ms. Gross walked right by the grandiloquent niceties of a joint meeting and confronted Mr. LaPointe accusatorily.
Away to a Fast Start
Sternly, she knocked the Parks and Rec Dept. onto its heels before a how-do-you-do breath could be expelled.
“The City Council has not been kept up to date on this (Master Plan) process,” Ms. Gross said. Mentioning several Master Plan procedures she said she had just learned about in a presentation by the department’s consultant, the Vice Mayor challenged the Parks and Rec Director to deliver.
“You have information that is important for us to know,” she said. “Why have we not seen it? Why is it not being shared?”
Mr. LaPointe, not known for public confrontations, seemed stunned by the rebuke. He said his department was not deliberately holding back crucial data. Rather, they were presently trying to convert their findings into “a more useful format.”
No Palliative
This hardly satisfied the Vice Mayor who promptly went back on the offensive.
She said important information seemed only to have been revealed to the City Council’s Parks and Rec subcommittee. “This should not be a question of two people get to know and three don’t,” Ms. Gross snapped.
Wiping Away Mistaken Impression
Gauging that the city’s side of this debate needed to be propped up, Mr. Fulwood inserted his strength of office. He called his intervention “a clarification.”
“No City Council member has seen any document,” the City Manager declared.
Sparked by the tone of the presentation by Jim Pickel, the consultant hired by the Parks and Rec Dept., elements of secrecy were implied in the focus group process. Disapprovingly, Ms. Gross pounced on the point. Once again the City Manager felt compelled to re-grab the wheel and offer what he termed a further clarification.
Nobody Has a Secret?
“The whole concept as far as I know,” Mr. Fulwood said, “never was for the focus groups to meet in secret.”
Ms. Gross fired back. “In the focus group draft letter,” she said, “it says ‘your responses will be strictly confidential.’”
Mr. LaPointe turned toward Mr. Pickel for relief.
“To clarify,” Mr. Pickel began, familiarly, “when it says ‘your input will be confidential,’ that means the responses from focus group members will be anonymous. We will take their ideas and write them down, but we won’t write down their names.”
Pre-Planning Is a Worry
Ms. Gross returned to one of her own recurring themes when she strongly objected to having Council members finger 20 community members for one of the focus groups.
She feared it would resemble a Usual Suspects lineup with the outcome “foreordained.”
To which Council colleague Steve Rose rejoined, “If not us, who?” Of course the Council should select names/groups, he said, because, “as elected officials, we were voted into office to lead, not to follow.”
Eliminate Who?
Partisanship was a popular touchstone. Members of the Commission — from Chair Jeff Cooper to Anita Shapiro, Vicki Daly Redholtz, Ms. James and Mr. Deen — and the Council fretted over disproportionate influence.
Councilman Scott Malsin said selectors should “make sure when the focus groups are chosen that the voices of one group don’t drown out others.” He also said “people with young children” and irregular park users should have a vote.
“I have a concern,” said Ms. Daly Redholtz, “about the focus groups being (insufficiently) inclusive.”
What Is the Plan?
Her observation must have dinged a nerve. By the time Mayor Alan Corlin adjourned the meeting at quarter to seven, it did not appear that any Culver City resident, regular or irregular parks user from in town or out of town, had been eliminated from the inexclusive list of potential jurors.
Mr. Cooper feared that if the casting net were too inspecific, a Tower of Babel might result.
Therefore, it was left up to the consultant to sort through the cacophony and create a harmonious symphony — in keeping with the theme of the evening — by an unspecified date. This year or next.
