Choosing prudence over peril, the City Council’s newest Dynamic Duo surprised the several hardy survivors left in Council Chambers late last night by eschewing an opportunity to bring the controversial Entrada Officer Tower project back from the pretty dead.
Hewing to the cautionary counsel — or warning — presented to the Council in private from the conservative viewpoint of City Atty. Carol Schwab, Vice Mayor Gary Silbiger and Councilman Chris Armenta seemed to agree that resurrecting a fully-cooked, done decision would be too fiscally risky to City Hall.
Otherwise, however, it was Kitchen Sink Night for the ambitious new Council soulmates before a steadily vanishing audience.
Between them, they trotted out a whole museum full of Mr. Silbiger’s pet projects of the last 6 years that were consistently denied by the recently term-limited Old Majority.
New Ears, New Hope
With 3 new members on the Council participating in their first full evening, the formerly foiled Mr. Silbiger dipped into his trunk of nostalgia and trotted out his used repertoire on a brand new audience, with the enthusiastic assistance of Mr. Armenta.
The Vice Mayor blew the dust off of three oldies that, so far, only he has thought had a chance to be regarded as goodies:
Public notification became a recurring theme, from the first minutes to the final ones.
A City Council-sponsored teen group that would be politics-centric. This received a cool reception, as it has every time in the past. He would love to see students involved in their city government. Bill LaPointe, Parks and Recreation Director, became the latest to remind Mr. Silbiger that his people have tried and the teens are not interested.
A downsizing of the long-standing Council policy that requires the assent of 3 members to agendize a wild-card subject. With his close friend and philosophical twin, Mr. Armenta, sitting at his left hand on the dais, Mr. Silbiger wants the number reduced to 2, himself and Mr. Armenta. (With irony, new Councilman Andy Weissman became the third assenting voice, sufficient to agendize the matter. Mr. Weissman said he deemed it worthy of exploration if not passage.)
Those three themes were so familiar to Council observers, and to Silbiger fans, that a couple persons in the tiny audience thought they heard Glenn Miller’s band or Glen Gray’s Casaloma orchestra tuning up behind the dais.
In each case, Mr. Armenta, whose presence and infectious energy seem to have put a new paint job on Mr. Silbiger’s oldies-but-maybes, voiced an enthusiastic second — just as Mr. Silbiger had envisioned it.
As the clock ticked within a couple of tocks of midnight, Mr. Armenta introduced the most imaginative, best received idea of the evening — suggesting a wall-hitting truce at 11 o’clock on Monday nights instead of letting the evening wend into the wee hours.
The First Opening
On Opening Night for a full month of budget discussions, Mr. Silbiger, ever the vigil watchdog for the public, left his calling card early.
With only two relatively succinct subjects on the abbreviated agenda following a couple months of very late night meetings, Mayor Scott Malsin opened the community part of the meeting by inquiring of new City Clerk Martin Cole how many members of the public had asked to speak.
Told 11, Mr. Malsin’s face lengthened. Adopting a collegial but business-like manner, the mantle he will wear as Mayor for the next 11 months, Mr. Malsin intended to run a taut, no-nonsense meeting on his first full night at the wheel.
Consulting with Mr. Cole, who actually is Mr. Rules when it comes to knowledge of City Hall/City Council policies, the Mayor was told that if he wished to trim public comments from 3 to 2 minutes per person, it was his prerogative.
Tighten the Tongues or Belts
In the interest of tidiness, Mr. Malsin indicated he wanted to rein in what had become marathon public comment periods. Frequently, they have run long, delaying the the start of the business portion of the meetings. The Council agenda calls for a 20-minute public comment period.
“Two minutes per speaker,” Mr. Malsin announced.
The Vice Mayor immediately and strenuously objected. “We have had a policy of allowing 3 minutes for many years,” Mr. Silbiger said. “People time their comments for 3 minutes. A lot of people have taken the evening off so they can speak.”
The audience loved it, and they began to applaud.
Mr. Malsin relented.
The 20-Minute Rule
As a compromise, he said 7 speakers would be invited to comment, to keep within the 20-minute goal, and the rest would have to speak at the end of the meeting. But when several of the 7 persons spoke economically, Mr. Malsin invited the remainder to the microphone.
It was a good thing the Mayor didn’t put off the last speakers because Chambers was virtually empty, driven away early in the evening by the dryness of budget discussions.
It would be easier for a ghost town in the Old West to draw a crowd to a hanging than it is to attract even a quorum in Culver City to a budget discussion.
Mr. Silbiger stubbornly remains unconvinced.
Shopping for Allies
At various, and frequent, points in the evening, he insisted to his new and old colleagues on the dais, to City Manager Jerry Fulwood, to Chief Financial Officer Jeff Muir — the unchallenged star of the evening —and anyone else who would listen that a way must be found, it just had to be, to draw the public in from Culver Boulevard to hear the budget discussions that most residents resist as dust-dry.
He was determined not to accept any more empty rooms. He was convinced that if residents were merely notified, they would flock to City Hall in impressive numbers. No one agreed with him.
“We have to re-think the budget process,” Mr. Silbiger said. “We have to figure out a way to get input from the public.
“We should think through how we are going to do maximum outreach.”
This was 75 minutes into the first budget discussion of the year, and only one resident — one — was in the audience.
Who’s Sorry Now?
Mr. Silbiger was undeterred.
“Those of us who have been doing organizing in the community have to find ways to reach the public.”
He wanted to know why, if the city of Santa Monica could draw lusty crowds to Culver City couldn’t do the same.
There may have been only one answer.
Mary Noller of the newly organized Finance Dept. noted that throughout her nearly two decades at City Hall, the only budget hearings that have drawn more than flies have been those where cutbacks were the feature of the evening.
Which probably goes back to the hanging theory.
