On the telephone from South Carolina, the new City Manager’s voice rang through cheerily as he was preparing for a weekend whirl through Culver City.
[img]428|left|Mark Scott||no_popup[/img] Mark Scott will be introduced to the community on Monday night at the 7 o’clock Town Hall meeting in Council Chambers.
For weeks, say those who have met him, this has seemed like a love affair eager to happen. His employers called him “a crowd-pleaser.”
City Council members who interviewed him said his effervescent, outgoing personality splashed across them like a drink of cold water on a sultry afternoon.
When he lands, he will not need a guide to find his way around his new hometown.
Back in the 1990s, in his role as the City Manager of Beverly Hills, Mr. Scott stood by Jody Hall-Esser, the City Manager of Culver City, when the remade City Hall was dedicated.
If the concept of culture shock in reverse is valid, that is what he will be experiencing when he starts his newest assignment, probably in early June.
He made a dramatic lifestyle change 5 1/2 years ago when he moved from Beverly Hills to Spartanburg in the Deep South, he said, because he had professional objectives that he could not achieve here.
The main motivation behind the re-location may have been that it afforded Mr. Scott a chance to get back to the people.
The experiment in relaxed living, personally and professionally, was amazingly successful, Mr. Scott said.
He raved about the “gracious Southern living,” a disarmingly relaxed lifestyle, that he and his wife Carol embraced in the Carolinas.
Changing His Mind
In Spartanburg, they found a Culver City-sized community, but spread over an area four times as large as Culver City.
City Councilman Mehaul O’Leary says that while now “I am absolutely blown away by him,” he originally was skeptical about Mr. Scott’s resume.
“Why would anyone leave Beverly Hills for Spartanburg?” Mr. O’Leary asked, rhetorically.
“I found that very curious. And I really delved into that aspect of it. He told us he just wanted to try something different. He had been there before, he said, and Spartanburg piqued his interest.”
The doubting Mr. O’Leary said that at first Mr. Scott’s reasoning did not feel right to him. “In the back of my mind,” said the Councilman, “I wondered if he had been pushed.
“But I found out differently in the next interview. His children had gone away to college. He had already gotten all the benefits (through the state pension fund) that he was going to get from his Beverly Hills job.
“And so, even with a reduction in salary in Spartanburg, he still was making the same amount of money. That made absolute sense to me then.”
Who Looked for Whom?
It turns out that Mr. Scott was not ready to return to West Los Angeles when City Manager Jerry Fulwood announced his retirement plans last autumn.
According to Mr. O’Leary, the Culver City position went looking for Mr. Scott, not the other way around. He said the headhunter City Hall used to track a replacement “fished him out. And Mark told us later that if the job had not been in Culver City, he would not have been interested in the first place.”
How different is Spartanburg from Culver City?
Consider this emblematic gem:
“I have literally been honked at one time in 5 1/2 years,” Mr. Scott boasted in the manner of a proud papa.
Welcome back to the Westside, where sometimes you can drive a full mile without drawing the ire, or honking horn, of a rival driver.
“You can’t even get out of LAX without being honked at,” Mr. Scott said.
A native of Fresno, where his family still resides, Mr. Scott left his hometown at the age of 28 and went on to spend 20 years in Beverly Hills, the last 14 as City Manager.
While drawing himself closer to the political soil lured him to South Carolina, slowdown is one matter, but slow is another. He discovered that it may have been Spartanburg residents who put the “laid” in “laid back.”
Practicing Restraint
Faultlessly polite can be too much of a good thing.
While the deceleration was tremendously appealing, “there is a downside,” he said.
“These wonderful people keep things inside. They don’t really say what is on their minds because they don’t want to offend.
“For example, when an elected office opens up, you are likely to have just one candidate. After the first person files papers, others may have thought of running. But they won’t want to offend the first person by running against him, or her.”
