City Manager Mark Scott, in his ninth month on the job, “surprised” but did not “shock” City Hall staffers this morning when he declared his resignation, citing family reasons.
[img]428|left|Mark Scott||no_popup[/img]A married family man, his family — especially his wife and parents — is spread across the American map. Mr. Scott has lived as a bachelor in Culver City since landing here last May. Finally, he could take no more.
Shortly after coming to work today, Mr. Scott summoned managers in City Hall to a 40-minute meeting to announce his departure.
He told them what he told this newspaper at the noon hour:
“One hundred percent, I love Culver City and I love my job.”
Soundly slightly sheepish but emphatically clear, he said the people of Culver City deserved better than his abrupt resignation.
Amidst suggestions that his thoughts may have drifted to the various outposts of his family, persons working around him said that Mr. Scott’s heart and professional commitment “have been total to Culver City.”
As early as tomorrow, he may announce his next professional position, in Central California, much closer to his aging parents, who live in Fresno.
At the outset of tonight’s 7 o’clock City Council meeting in City Hall, Mr. Scott will elaborate on his two previous statements — to Council members and City Hall staffers.
He told the newspaper he has not written out a formal message for this evening — “I couldn’t bring myself to do that.”
Although the search for a new City Manager may overshadow this spring’s four-way race for two Council seats, April 13, Mr. Scott has proposed to the Council that he would like to remain in place through the election season and the subsequent budgetary process.
That would not preclude him, he hopes, from starting, simultaneously, in his new appointment in the Central Valley.
Ultimately, that will be the call of the City Council.
City Hall sources said that the Council, the hiring authority, away from public view, may have had reservations about whether, because of family constraints, Mr. Scott could fulfill his three-year contract.
His agreement is valued at just under $300,000 annually. His salary is $223,932.80, plus benefits, estimated at 30 percent.
Tall, slender and dapper, the 60-year-old Mr. Scott sparked extraordinary fanfare last spring when he returned to Southern California following a 5-year stint in the same position in Spartanburg, S.C. He not only represented a strong change from his predecessor, Jerry Fulwood, but an earlier lengthy posting in Beverly Hills was a persuasive factor.
The primary theme behind his hiring was that he was coming home. Previously, he had spent 20 years in Beverly Hills, 14 as the City Manager.
But the crux of the new City Manager’s daily but publicly muted dilemma turned out to be insoluble.
Mr. Scott was faced with a unique, towering and nagging geographical conundrum:
• His ailing parents are 200 miles away in the Central Valley.
• Carol, his wife of 36 years, is thousands of miles away in a separate direction, cross-country in Spartanburg, fulfilling a business commitment. Husband and wife would only see each other about once every five weeks, on jet-fast weekends.
The Scotts — who have two adult children, one on each coast — decided 10 days ago: Enough of the split-screen living.
They held the resignation news to themselves, and their son and daughter, until last Friday when Mr. Scott emailed his job-changing intentions, and the reason, to the five members of the City Council, who hired him last March.
In a personal, and not incidental, aside, the Scotts’ daughter, a graduate of the University of Richmond, was involved in an accident last Friday in the historic snowstorm that buried the mid-Atlantic states. Her car was totaled, but her father said that she is safe.
